I was able to get all the technical refreshing done today. Not too shabby a process. The immediate thing you notice is that the interface has been prettied up quite a bit. New icons, new splash screens, the ribbons' been tweaked a little bit, etc. It looks really nice, but let's face it, we don't use Office for the eye candy, the real test is how it helps you get things accomplished.

On that front, a couple of things I noticed quickly and loved, I can copy/paste from the attachment preview in Outlook now, instead of having to open the file, and the Send button on an email is no longer part of the ribbon, and therefore subject to not being available when I'm doing different things. It's taken up permanent residence below the ribbon, near the To, CC, BCC and a new button that lets you select which account to send from. It's a small thing, but a useful change to my mind.

Things I was a bit less excited about? The first time I opened Word, I got an error about the template. I think that's because I was running it 2003 compatibility mode and when the refresh installed it took me out of that mode, but left the .dot 2003 template as my default. Opening Word, saving a new template as a .dotx got things golden again, however.

The other thing, and I know they got a lot of complaints about it not doing this, but now the big Office button on the left side has a slightly different function. Click it once, and you get to take a look at the options, or the Open menu, double click it, and you close the program. Again, I understand that the very upper left of the window in previous versions would close the program with a double click, but you never, ever clicked on that spot in the normal process of using the program. You click the Office button all the time. I've already accidentally double-clicked it when I went to view the options in Word once, and I haven't been using it for a whole day! I'm going to grow to hate this, I've a feeling. Anyone know if there's an option to disable that?

What have been your thoughts so far?

tags: TechnicalRefresh, Outlook2007, Word2007