Overall my experience with Office 2007 has been good

Office 2007 Review
This is my first blog entry using the new publish to blog feature in Word 2007. I must say that the new ribbon is very, very good. It’s like Microsoft took all the stuff I use on a daily basis in Word, Excel and Outlook and put it out where I can use it. By now you must have viewed the screen shots of the ribbon. Those of you will small screens might want to stick with Office 2003, as the new ribbon in Office 2007 takes up a lot of screen space. I doubt this is much of a problem for most users with modern computers running at 1024 x 768 or greater.
So here is a quick review of the things that work in the new versions of Office 2007.
GOOD
   1. I love the ease of use of the ribbon, all the hours of user research has paid off. They took the 4000 options no one ever used and buried them. Things like changing case of text is now just one click away. If you find something that you use on a regular basis, but it’s not in the ribbon you can always “customize the quick access toolbar” and add it there.
   2. The color scheme is cool and clean, I find the icons easier to understand, and things like “check names” in outlook is more prominent.
   3. Microsoft took the “Start” button concept from Windows and applied it to Office 2007. Now we have this very large round button in the top left-hand corner. I found this menu to be well organized and easy to use. My wife on the other hand couldn’t find where things went. So average users may find the GUI overhaul a bit hard at first. But over all the new interface changes are well done.
   4. Due to a legal scuffle with Adobe the “Save to PDF” function was removed in the final shipping version.I’ve used this save to PDF feature and it works very well. It’s actually much faster than Adobes own implementation of it in the full version of Acrobat.
   5. The killer Outlook feature (other than the UI enhancements) is the ability to set emails as “TODO ITEMS” anyone who has used Outlook for long soon starts to use emails as todo items. Now you can actually set emails from people as action items. I find this feature the best part of Outlook. Now when a client sends me a change for a website in an email, I simply tag the email as an “TODO” item. This is feature alone is worth the upgrade.
BAD
   1. I’ve noticed you have to do a bit of fiddling to get Office 2007 to save to the old format of 2003. I exchange documents with many clients and most of them have not upgraded yet. Giving them word files with the extension “.docx” might through them off. BTW this is Microsoft’s new XML Office format. You can set Office to save to the older format by default, but it’s a pain to find that setting at first.
   2. Like all MS products Office 2007 is a memory pig. For instance as I type this blog entry using Word running, and I switch to the “Windows Task Manager” to see how much memory it’s consuming. 55,704 k! Yep, almost 55megs! Now I have nothing to worry about since I’m running a system with 4 GIG of RAM. Users with slower machines with less RAM might want to wait for an upgrade until they get a more modern system if you plan to run many programs at once.
   3. The ribbon takes a little learning. I wouldn’t upgrade to Office 2007 in the middle of a big project where you need to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint all the time.
   4. I’ve found this version of Office to crash more often than 2003. (on the plus side the file has always be automatically recovered by Office each time, so no data loose yet!)
   5. One thing that bugs me about the new GUI. Where the heck is the “close document” button. When you click the “x” in the top right hand corner it closes the document you are in. But if that is the only document open it closes Word right down. What if i wanted to close that document but keep Word running? There is no easy way to do this except choose it form the new Office Start menu, or use the keyboard short cut control “x” .
Final Thoughts
Overall my experience with Office 2007 has been good. If you have a new computer this version of Office will be great for you. Those with older slower machines may wait for the upgrade until there hardware catches up. I imagine that this version of Office will run well on any computer with 1 GIG of RAM or greater. If you plan to user Outlook and surf the web you should be fine. But trying to run heavy apps like Photoshop, Office and Web browsing may become an issue on older machines. I would highly recommend Office 2007 just for the productively enhancements. I find my self doing more work, instead of hunting for commands in the software.
Side Note:
I have been using MS Word since it was first created for the Mac. So I am a long time user. This is the best version of Word I’ve used in all that time. Hats off to Microsoft.