Microsoft Office 2007 beta 2 (technical refresh)

Interface
Rumours that Microsoft planned to pare down its Ribbon of features along the top of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access have panned out -- up to a point. Although the Ribbon by default doesn't appear smaller than it did in May, you can roll it up to make more room for a document. To do so, you just double-click any tab. Click once more, and the Ribbon unfurls again. Or you can right-click a tab to pick Minimize and to set preferences for the Quick Access Toolbar and keyboard shortcuts. The personalisation is far easier to find than in version 2003.

An Add-ins tab on the Ribbon offers more potential for customisation. Because our test PC already had Microsoft Student installed, our Add-ins displayed Student's tools for maths, science and language learning. We wonder what else Microsoft might plan on integrating here. Other interface changes include a serious silver colour theme in addition to the blue and black options.

File formats
Before you quickly save a file within Office 2007 and send it to someone who may have an older version of Office installed, you'll have to select Save As, then Word 97-2003 Document. Office 2007's new XML documents are supposed to be one-quarter the size of older Office files. They also keep elements of a document segregated so that if, say, an image gets corrupted, you should still be able to recover the text. However, the new document extensions will be marked with an X and won't open in older versions of the programs.

Word 2007
We dislike Office 2003's default text styles, which continually edit our text while we're writing. Word 2007 adds new styles and templates, but we also hope that the new approach will make it less irritating to compose a text document without a ton of formatting. Luckily, the next version of Word allows you to save your preferences and apply them as a default whenever you open new files.

Word 2003's testy HTML formatting has turned off many a blogger and Web designer. But Word 2007 is built to support Web text formatting and images for blog services including Wordpress, TypePad, Blogger, Windows Live Spaces and Microsoft SharePoint. The Publish option within the Start menu lets you make posts without leaving Word. However, when we chose to post a blog entry, Word opened a new window with a truncated blog-editing Ribbon, which initially confused us.

One of our complaints about Office 2007 is that its dynamic Ribbon sometimes hides features. For instance, you don't see how to edit a picture until you click the image, triggering the Picture Tools Format tab to appear.

Outlook 2007
Microsoft is aiming to lock out spam email better than before, as well as to flag phishing scams that might dupe you into sharing personal details on fraudulent Web sites. If you get a con game email posing as a notification from your bank, Outlook 2007 is designed to flag it and keep you from clicking links within that email. Outlook's search engine is new, too.

For jet-setting Outlook users, the 2007 edition is designed to help you manage multiple time zones. You'll be able to share a meeting with fellow users in Tokyo, Toronto or Tallinn without confusing everybody about the time.

Excel 2007
Excel is getting new controls for objects, such as charts and pictures. To serve users who run Excel on dual-core computers, Excel 2007 will also have a multi-threaded calculation engine.

PowerPoint 2007
PowerPoint's updates are designed to help you make sleeker presentations, and there are new styles and effects for pictures, such as shadows and glows. The presentation program has a new Home tab that includes features for drawing and formatting shapes and images. And the Insert tab now emphasises Photo Album tools that allow you to turn folders of pictures into slide shows.

Security
Microsoft has created a Trust Center button that you can reach through the Options setting within the Quick Access drop-down menu. Here, you can control macros and ActiveX settings, as well as manage the privacy options to better control when Office connects to the Web or to make hidden markups visible. And from the main drop-down menu in the upper-left corner of each application, the Prepare option lets you encrypt a document and set permission restrictions.

We like Office 2007's new Prepare option within the main menu. From here, you can mark a file as final, encrypt it and restrict permissions to selected users.

Training
Microsoft is aware that the Office renovation may perplex new users as well as upgraders, so the company is building plenty of learning help into the 2007 system. You'll be able to pick how-to tips from among videos, interactive demos, training courses, reference guides and even quizzes. On the one hand, this seems helpful. But at the same time, Microsoft seems to be buffering against a potential onslaught of user confusion. Ideally, software should be intuitive enough that you don't need to spend as much time learning how it works as you do to make it work for you.

We expect users to have a variety of love/hate reactions to Office 2007's extreme alterations. Some people may jump right in and flow with the changes; others may sink and wish they hadn't upgraded. However, in our experiences testing the various beta versions of Office 2007, we prefer the Ribbon's tabbed layout of features to the myriad drop-down menus and dialogue boxes within Office 2003 that sometimes still stump us. We just wish that the Ribbon would stop changing in anticipation of our next move. We appreciate the applications' many features, but the constant shape-shifting of the interface sometimes interfered when we wanted to execute tasks quickly.