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Microsoft, last week, released the first public beta of MS Office 2007. Overall the companies goal was to issue a makeover that refreshed the look and feel of the programs while making it easier to use. Thus far it seems that they succeeded in the makeover, essentially “Apple-fying” the products, but the new feel has a learning curve of its own (after 10 years of the standard office apps) that makes the easy and most popular features and harder to find.

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 front and center within a tabbed Ribbon across the top of the interfaces of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access. We expect this new look to challenge longtime users with a steep learning curve. The intent is to make the apps 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. While 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. Though 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 those image-tweaking features existed.

System requirements for Office 2007 aren’t finalized 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). Microsoft has reduced the number of suites for the Office 2007 System to seven, ranging from Basic to Enterprise. Most consumers will opt for Basic (containing Excel, Outlook, Word) or Standard, which throws in PowerPoint. The Small Business package adds Publisher as well as the Business Contact Manager version of Outlook.

Read [Cnet]