Microsoft Office 2007 Review

I do my best to be an early adopter when it comes to geeky stuff. My most recent download? Microsoft Office 2007. It just barely came out and it's been about four years since the last Office release (I could be wrong but I think 2003 was the last release). I've had Office 2003 for a while but it's not a lot different than Office XP or Office 2000 in my opinion. I was anxious to try out the new 60 day demo of '07. Thanks to my blazing fast cable connection, the 720 MB download took 12 minutes- not too shabby (about 1mb/second). The install went smooth but I'm not sure that the second part of the download, which made up about half of the 720 megs, was for. The first half installed everything.
Anyway, the new interface is pretty consistent throughout the various programs. Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint all have a new navigational interface. No more File, Edit, View, etc. Now they have tabs with different shortcuts and options across the top. It's very intuitive and makes a lot of sense.
One of the biggest differences that you notice right away is the new look. Everything has a very slick and modern look to it. Maybe Microsoft has taken a hint from Apple or something, but I really enjoy the look of the layout, splash screens, backgrounds and menus.
<-- Composing an email is entirely different than before, too. As you can see in this screenshot, there is a Windows button on the top left that has a lot of the root features like open, save, print, etc. Email composition offers the same tabs as Word, making it easier to apply formatting to your emails- something that most people don't do much of but maybe that's because it wasn't very convenient in previous versions of Office. Also in Outlook, when you mark a junk mail as 'not junk', it automatically puts it into your Inbox. I always thought it was dumb that when you used to mark an email that had been filtered into your junk box as 'not junk', it would leave it with the junk.
The last thing that stood out to me was the new quick search feature. I use a Mac at work all day and I love being able to search the computer and network very quickly and easily in any window. Along with Office '07 comes a quick search feature that lives up to it's name. Google had a desktop search feature that came out a couple of years ago that indexed your files and allowed you to search quickly but I eventually stopped using it. This one seems very similar and seems to work really well. I can't say I'm gonna miss the little dog. That dog would dig and dig for what seemed like hours and rarely found a bone. Tchau, puppy.
All in all I'm very pleased with Office 2007. I'll probably go ahead and get it when my trial runs out. A 60 day trial is great, though. I'm not sure if it's done as a marketing tool, but I really like the fact that it's twice as long as most trials. Props to ol' Willy Gates on this one. Nice work.

PS- I hope to have a Vista review soon but I haven't gotten the official version yet. I had the beta but it didn't work that well so I uninstalled it.