Save as PDF, maybe

Who else thinks Adobe is being ridiculous in demanding MS take the option to save as a PDF out of Office 2007? Seriously, there are so many other ways to create a PDF that don't require buying Adobe's products that it just seems silly for them to demand it be taken out of Office. I've been creating PDF's for a long time without having a copy of Acrobat, having it built in to Office just seems a whole lot more user-friendy than what we've all been doing with PDF-print drivers, doesn't it? They're just asking for PDF to give way to a truly open format with this sort of behavior.


posted 8:31 PM | 1 comments | Links to this post

Known issues

Nice pointer from Outlook tips today, to the list of known Office 2007 beta issues. Definitely something to take a look at.


posted 8:11 PM | 0 comments | Links to this post

Ribbons and bows

The first time I saw a screenshot of the Ribbon, I immediately thought to myself, that right there may be a helpdesk worker's worst nightmare. After using it a few times and showing it around the helpdesk we came to a somewhat different conclusion. The idea of a toolbar, if you will, that changes as you move to different commands in the interface actually seems like a decent idea. Instead of having something buried 3-4 menus deep, it'll be much easier to find it when you're not sure where it is. In fact, I think the location of certain features actually make a whole lot more sense. Things like bullets, symbols and watermarks make more sense where they are than trying to go a couple of menus deep to get them formatted correctly.

Of course, what this UI assumes is that you understand the context of what you're doing. You need to understand that a watermark is a page layout option and be in that ribbon. Not too difficult for long time Word powerusers, and probably much more intuitive for a new user, but for users who simple know what they need to know because they've picked up the routine of doing it, this is going to be a major problem. This is where I think IT support folks are going to run into problems. We all have users who know how to do what they need to do, without much of a contextual understanding. These are the folks who call the helpdesk repeatedly when you make a slight change to a template, or move an icon on a customized toolbar. The slightest change throws them off their game. This may be too much of a change for these folks to cope with very well.

The bottom line, I think, is that the Ribbon is a step up in UI. It's more intuitive and useful than the standard Office menus have been. It simply makes more sense. But in the corporate world, this upgrade is going to be a mucher tougher sell because some of your staff is going to be hard-pressed to learn the new interface and still be as productive as they have been using 2000 or 2003. It's going to take a commitment to education and training to be a successful upgrade.


posted 9:22 PM | 0 comments | Links to this post

First opening OneNote 2007

Upon first opening of OneNote, it will ask you to upgrade the format of your notes to 2007, which supports multiple notebooks and just overall has a different way of handling things. So all my folders turned into Notebooks. Which is fine, I would have rather had that to begin with. I wasn't really happy with the way you had to navigate into a folder and then back out of a folder to get back to the "main screen" if you will. With multiple notebooks and an extra navigation area on the left of the screen, they've solved that. Lovely!

Not so lovely, the "upgrade" managed to pull in a couple of backup pages. OneNote 2003 had a setting that let you automatically back up pages. When 2007 imported them over, it treated those "backups" as normal pages. Not too good.

Also not too good, but I guess understandable, now that My Notebook isn't the default location, it's OneNote Notebooks, there are two copies of my notes! There's the 2003 version in My Notebook, and the 2007 copy in OneNote Notebooks. Only one opens when I open 2007. The other set opens when I open 2003. It might be nice if there was a way to synch them, or even export the 2007 notes if/when the beta period ends so I can go back to 2003 without losing everything I've done. (Of course I'll probably upgrade anyway, but it'd be nice to have that option. Perhaps in the full release there will be a converter.)

Overall though, first impression is really positive.


posted 9:15 PM | 0 comments | Links to this post

Office 2007 breaks Works

I can honestly say that I've seen this one firsthand. My laptop has Works 8.5 on it, simply because I never bothered to uninstall if when I installed Office 2003. Occasioanlly I get a .wps file at work that I need the Office converters to open and that are broken in our standard install of Word at work because of macros or something. Usually I just double-click the file and save as a .doc, not caring whether it opens in Works or Word. Today, I double-clicked it and got the DLL error. I could easily open it from within Word, so I don't really care, but if you're dependant on Works, you should definitely keep this in mind and maybe not install the beta on the same machine.

Or, give the fixes a try and let us know if they work.


posted 9:53 PM | 0 comments | Links to this post

Other Office Add-ins

The other Office add-ins I have installed seem to work ok. WordToys showed up under the "Add-ins" Ribbon the first time I launced Word 2007. My Excel add-in, ASAP Utilities needed to be installed as a defaut macro again, but once I ran through that, there it was on the same ribbon.


posted 2:57 PM | 0 comments | Links to this post