Microsoft Office 2007 beta 2

ZDNet Editors CNET

Published: 31 May 2006

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Microsoft has scheduled a radical 2007 makeover for its ubiquitous productivity suite, Office. The impending release, expected early next year, will further distinguish the company's tools from those of the competition. Office 2007 will reveal a dynamic new interface and smaller, XML-based file formats. We've installed the beta 2 test version of Office 2007 and have been playing with the features for a week.

See for yourself
What do the next editions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook have in store? To get a feel for the suite's progress, see our screenshot galleries of Microsoft Word 2007 beta 2, Excel 2007 beta 2, Outlook 2007 beta 2 and PowerPoint 2007 beta 2.

You can sign up for the beta software or test-drive this preview of Office 2007 online: see here for more details. You can also track Microsoft's progress via pictures of the earlier build, Office 12 beta, from last autumn.

Ribbon
Microsoft rebuilt Office from the ground up, and most features are located in different places than in versions 2003 and earlier. Gone are what Microsoft considers too much of a good thing: the buried location of more than 1,000 features within top-down menus. Now you can access functions easily within a tabbed Ribbon across the top of the interfaces of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. We expect this new look to challenge experienced users with a steep learning curve. The intent is to make the applications more intuitive, but the opposite is true for certain features if you want to fall back on old habits. For example, Insert Comment is no longer found within the Insert menu but within the Ribbon's Review tab. Although we had problems initially getting oriented, we found our bearings for most of the major functions within a couple of days.

Dynamic
We have mixed feelings about the Ribbon's ability to surface and hide features according to your task at hand. Although designed to make it easier to find tools, the Contextual Tabs sometimes left us befuddled. For instance, to view the full gamut of changes you can make to an image within Word, you must first select the image. What if, say, you're working in Word and wish that you could insert an image, rotate it, and wrap the text around it to make a newsletter? If you haven't already inserted and clicked on a picture, then the Format tab will be out of sight, and you'd never know that those image-tweaking features existed.

System requirements
System requirements for Office 2007 aren't finalised yet, but so far Microsoft says that you must run Windows XP SP2 on a 500MHz PC with a 2GB hard drive and 256MB of RAM (512MB for Outlook with Business Contact Manager).

Suites
Microsoft has reduced the number of suites originally planned for the Office 2007 System to seven, ranging from Basic to Enterprise. Ordinary users will probably opt for Basic (containing Excel, Outlook and Word) or Standard, which throws in PowerPoint. The Small Business package adds Publisher as well as the Business Contact Manager version of Outlook.

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