Office 2007 Beta 2...

[John L]

I spent the holiday installing the Beta for the next version of Office on one of my machines. It has managed to freak me out. Microsoft has promised that the next version of Outlook would be more "Task Oriented"...and they delivered on that. Somehow, Outlook managed to go through my olde e-mails and, based on the heuristics of the message or header, presented me with a sizable "To-do" list...some of them based on olde messages up to a year old. Once I told Outlook I had completed the tasks I was allowed to go outside and play ;) .

It reminds me a lot of a Outlook Efficiency course I took courtesy of my employer (http://www.theeffectiveedge.com/). Great course if you can suspend disbelief long enough to try thier methods.

Other observations, the "Office Assistant" (aka "Clippy") seems to finally have disappeared completely. Now, who is going to tell me it looks like I am writing a letter??

[DaveM]

Hmmmm.....somewhat reminiscent of the dreaded IBM pc jr. If you hit both shift keys at once (I think--it was something that was easy to do accidentally), regardless of what you were doing at the time, up would come "Keyboard Adventure--With Gerald McBoingBoing", a built-in program intended to teach small children how to type. Scary.

[Eva]

What? No office assistant??? It was such a cute dog! (or cat or whatever you chopse) It was the only thing I liked in the windows design... :(

Eva

[Amy in Vermont]

Ah the joys of new stuff!

Since we have a 4 year life cycle here, and are still upgrade folks from NT to XP and Office 2003, I imagine it will be a while before I have to deal with the realities of the "new" Office, or Vista. We typically wait until SP1 is released before imaging anything with a new OS! We have such a diversity of stuff that HAS to work with anything new... kind of a pain!