Yes, that’s right. Office 2007. Yesterday, I downloaded the trial (the standard version of Office) and installed Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I would have installed Outlook, but that required uninstalling my current version of Outlook, and since this is only a trial, I didn’t want to do anything…drastic. Well, I could always reinstall Office 2003, but I don’t exactly have the CD. Long story…well, no short one actually, but not the topic of this post. Why I do I let myself distract me so much?
Anyways, as I said, I installed the three major Office programs and tried them out. So far, I’ve only given them a cursory look, but I plan on using them for quite a bit of my college writing assignments since the trial runs until March 31, which I assume is when Office 2007 actually comes out. I could be wrong. I sometimes am.
So, I’m sure you’re wondering just what the deal is with this “ribbon” feature we all keep hearing about with respect to Office 2007. It’s actually quite handy. Hard to get used to after years of the file and edit menus, but it’s very intuitive, showing the functions you would most likely need for the task at hand. Yep, no more diving into the page setup window to have different odd and even headers, among other things. I had no trouble finding the things I needed. In fact, it was even easier to do certain things, such as edit the header. Not only that, but I discovered a whole host of features I never knew existed. Looking back at Word 2003, those features were hidden deep within menus I’d have never looked in.
Ready for a look? Here’s the ribbon from Word:
That’s about all I’ve got for now. As I said, I haven’t explored any of the Office applications very deep yet, but from what I’ve seen already, I give major props to Microsoft for an excellent revamp of an excellent productivity suite. If you’re interested, you can download trials of all the different versions of Office at the Microsoft Office website.
