At the behest of my friend Blake, as well as just “getting with the times,” I upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007 this week. I’m pleased to say that for the most part I’m glad I did.
I had hesitated originally; I didn’t want to learn “the whole new interface” I had read and heard about. I was really nervous that my productivity would go down hill during this “learning curve.” Kudos to Microsoft; I wish I had done this months ago. The learning curve is not uphill — it’s downhill all the way!
Everything is right where you need it — when you need it — even when you are not expecting it. The new toolbar, now called the Ribbon, has everything in easy view and right where you need it. It’s like they re-designed the dashboard of the car for the driver. When you highlight text (in Word), a new toolbar automatically pop’s up with font formatting options — no longer do you have the make the long trek up to the tiny toolbar buttons (or right click and get a popup to fumble around with). Doing my work in Word and Excel this week has been much more productive.
Outlook (the application I live in and work with everyday) also has benefited from similar enhancements. The Ribbon is there when you are composing emails. If you use add-in’s like Foresight* or Speedfiler, the Ribbon gives you more options than you had in Outlook 2003′s toolbar — making working with email more effective! The benefits extend to the calendar also.
The Calendar is FINALLY a calendar. The week view has navigation buttons at the top to move through the weeks. It always drove me NUTS using the keyboard to try to move through the weeks. Now you just “turn the pages.” The month calendar is the same way. In addition, you can see where each month begins and ends (in 2003, it was hard to tell). The look is great. It all functions and feels much better. There’s a lot of good here, and, a little bad.
Outlook seems to have “grown” — it acts like a larger application. Word and Excel definitely feel a hair slower at times — Outlook is even worse. Some of this could be to me also installing Windows Desktop Search (the jury is still out on that, but, I’m leaning towards dumping it. For example, “Snooze Indexing” doesn’t stop it from indexing!!!) and Groove (ditto). Also, I see a lot of left overs from Outlook 2003 (right click on a calendar item and the first time the menu pop’s up and goes away — you have to click again) – which makes me wonder how think the “new coat of paint” layer is. Finally, almost every time I open Outlook, it says my data file has a problem. I’ve seen some entries on the web blaming Windows Desktop Search for this — so, if I dump that, maybe that will go away.
All in all — good and bad — I’m liking it and happy I’ve switched. 
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* Before I get any comments from the “peanut gallery” about Foresight not working on Office 2007, Foresight will work if it was installed with Outlook 2003 and you upgrade to Outlook 2007. Foresight does not work — yet — on fresh installs of Outlook 2007. It’s coming — promise!
