Living With Office 2007 Beta Part I

Been working on how to organize this without writing a post that’s 5000 words long. So I figure I’m just going to break it out a couple of apps at a time. This post covers Outlook and PowerPoint 2007: the first because I live in it, and the second because, for me, it’s the Blue Ribbon Winner for this version.

INSTALLATION

Because it’s the first ‘hands on’ post, I’ve got to hit the install portion. Fortunately, not much to say here, even under Vista. For both RC1 and RC2 it went something like this: Insert CD, enter product key, click “Typical Install” and hang out for a while.

Microsoft did a rather noticeable redesign of the Outlook UI in Office 2003, so I think they took it easy this time around. The UI has been tweaked a bit, but for the most part, it’s the same. Install was a bit of a pain, because the free Outlook Personal Folders Backup Tool that I always use to swap my mailbox between PCs, doesn’t work with the new verion as yet. Had to export the usual way and then import multiple PSTs.

Setting up my accounts was different, too. The New Account Wizard has changed as has the Account summary screen. Outlook is supposed to have some new smarts when setting up Exchange accounts against an Exchange 2007 server, but you’ll need to wait for the upcoming Office 2007/Servers 2007 review for the real skinny on that. Meantime, the new Account Wizard does a good job of consolidating all your Outlook feed options in one place: Email, shared calendars, Sharepoint sites, and the much-ballyhooed RSS feed among others. Setting things up is as easy as dropping the right Internet address into Account Settings and then looking for the content on the left-hand tree pane. Once you’re all setup, you’ll notice that Outlook Today is DOA. Instead, Microsoft has created a To-Do bar on the right side of the Inbox screen. You get a mini-calendar view with some color highlights for appointments, a summary of your next three upcoming appointments underneath that, and then what I thought was a Task summary. Only it’s not a Task summary. It’s a list of outstanding tasks as well as any emails that have the red alert flag and a completion date assigned to them. The size of my list shows you how much attention I pay to those. Oh yeah, and you can customize the To-Do bar to show only some of these options or do away with it entirely.

And while Outlook didn’t get one of the cool new ribbon bars, you do see it when you create a message–probably because you’re calling on Word as the email editor. But Office was kind enough to give you an email ribbon with a Send button and other Outlook-specific sundries.

Not too many other changes. There’s a new Trust Center under the Tools menu–basically a quick way to setup all your email security settings in one screen–digital signatures, email encryption, download handling, inline HTML rules, etc. All there. Apparently, it’s controllable as a Group Policy object from Active Directoy, but we’ll have to test that in the server review–for us lone users, it’s just a nice email security summary screen.

Day-to-day impressions are good. Outlook looks great in Vista and the only hiccup I had in two solid weeks of use was one instance where she refused to start without a system reboot–and that’s beta software.

Is it a must-have upgrade from Outlook 2003? Actually, I’d have to say “No.” Don’t get me wrong; it’s a real nice app and when it comes as part of Office 2007 I’ll definitely install it. But if it were a one-on-one upgrade, I’d probably put it on the back burner.

POWERPOINT

The Blue Ribbon Winner of my two weeks. Not because I do a load of sales presentations (though I did a number of those as well), but because in the last year I’ve become a blogging slave. Blogging for money means finding mounds of little custom art elements to brighten up your posts. Microsoft has made Powerpoint the perfect tool for that because it’s added some amazingly intuitive and super-slick-looking graphics processing tools to this version.

Drop a photo onto a Powerpoint 2007 slide and you’ve got a load of new options to tweak and customize it (above and below). There are new frames, picture effects, photo filters, a load of new Word Art effects and it’s all done very easily. Just click on the icon in the format ribbon, and then hover your mouse cursor over a selection in order to see a full-size preview. Very slick. You can create a very cool and highly specific art bloblet in just a few minutes.

Only things I didn’t like are the same reasons I move any little art creations I make here into an actual photo editor for final processing: cropping and resizing. Powerpoint has tools for this, but I can’t stand them. Not at all intuitive, and certainly not as slick as the rest of the tool. Still need some work in the dept.

They’ve even redone the online Clip Art Web site. New look and a more icon-driven copy/paste function. Other than that, it’s nothing earth shattering, but like most of the rest of Office 2007, it’s fun to look at.

Office Beta Clip Art Site Full-Size Image

If I had a general complaint about PowerPoint 2007, then it’s more a complaint about the way the ribbon works. Microsoft’s intent with the ribbon was to keep things consistent. “The button you need is always there”, yadda yadda.

However, the ribbon’s options change depending on what you’re doing. For example, dropping a picture onto a slide causes the Format tab to become available–that has all the effects options in it. De-select the picture, however, and the entire Format tab disappears. Or, create Word Art and you get one set of text effects, but you’ve got to remember to have the text itself selected to even see certain options.

It’s not a killer, but it is going to frustrate your users until they make it part of their finger memory.

Even after two weeks I haven’t fully explored PowerPoint 2007’s new special effects capabilities–haven’t done any animations yet, for instance. The app gets even more options when put in front of a SharePoint or the new Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS) server. More on that later. Meantime, if you have any questions on how something works, leave a comment and I’ll check on it for you.

Next post: Word & Excel.