Office 2007 Is The Stone Cold Nuts
I’ve tried every Microsoft Office product since I was in high school, and every time I thought that they’d finally published the ultimate version. Surely, I’d think, they’ll never be able to compel me to upgrade to the next. Maybe, I thought, I’ll buy a new one two versions down the line. Every time they’ve proven me wrong.
A lot of stuff Microsoft makes is kinda junky. Their websites all suck. MSN is nowhere near as good as Google. Run the same search on both, the difference is readily apparent. Hotmail is trounced by Gmail and Yahoo. SQL Server is probably not even in the top 3 and Access is laughable. Windows Vista is great, but most of its best features have been in OSX for years. And XP served its purpose, but was never really a joy to use, except when compared to the abomination that was Windows 98.
But Office is different. It’s really their only product that is always light years ahead of the competition and, somehow, always far better than previous versions. It’s their Photoshop.
My favorite feature in this one is obviously the ability to publish directly to a blog from Word. I can only hope that this will improve the spelling on a few of the blogs I read. I’ve been composing in Word and cut and pasting for the three plus years I’ve been blogging for that reason, but judging by a lot of the stuff you read on the net, not too many other people do the same.
I love the Ribbon of course. They’ve basically taken all of the zillions of commands, put them in toolbars as logically as possible, and tabbed them. It couldn’t be easier to navigate.
There’s also a contextual spell checker, that attempts to notify you if you put a “to” where a “too” should be. I’ve thrown it a few softballs and it caught them. I don’t know for sure yet how many of the extremely annoying typos that happen to be an actual word this will end up preventing, but it’s definitely some, and anything that makes things easier to read is OK by me.
So I feel it safe to say that this time Microsoft has built the ultimate Office product. There could be absolutely nothing they can do to make me upgrade to the next version.
