Office 12 rocks

I am playing with the Office 12 Beta 1 bits, and I can just say it rocks.

Of course the new ribbon feature take a while to use it correctly, but it feels very “organic“, all the right tools spot on when I need them. For example in the current version of Word, try to quickly find how to put a watermark text in the background of your document. In Word 12 no more than 5 seconds, with a lot of preset types.

I already seen on the web a company with a ribbon type user control for .Net 2.0 (can’t remember their name). Is this thing patented by Microsoft?

It’s amazing how much the Beta 1 is already so reliable, exception maybe of Outlook 12.

Outlook crash a lot between a Contacts view and the Calendar one (make me think I have to report this to the Beta centre).

Other than that the new Mail view with the To Do panel on the right is really amazing.

No ribbon or RSS reader in this version, but it has been confirmed for the Beta 2 and the final release.

Now time to give a try to Access and Excel.