I realized today that the release of Office 2007 is upon us, and that someone had best familiarize themselves with it, because it won’t be long before we start getting questions on it. (And believe me, there will be screaming. A lot of people here are resistant to change. And this is a huge change.)

So I went through the Office 2007 demos on the Microsoft site, and although it’s not quite as horrific as I thought it would be, converting is going to be a problem. Additionally, I wasn’t that impressed with the demos. The focus seemed to upon document presentation. Which is all well and good, except that in practice what we’re going to get is people spending all their time changing to formatting of their documents rather than focusing upon the content.

Seems like the motto of the demos should be: Office 2007 – Making It Even Easier to Shine Shit.

Sorry, but I simply don’t care about applying themes to Word documents and Excel worksheets. What I care about it how easy it is to work with text and numbers, and how useful the spell checker is.

Now this doesn’t mean that Microsoft hasn’t improved the things that are important. I’m just saying that the demos focused upon things that aren’t important, while making me dig through the site to discover information I needed, like whether we can still use keyboard commands (you can use them, but in the demos the commands are no longer listed anywhere) and whether you can concurrently run Office 2003 and 2007 (the answer appears to be yes, although there may be issues.)

So, we’ll see what happens when I actually get my hands on a copy of Office 2007. I don’t think I’ll hate it, but I can tell you right now I don’t think I’ll care for the amount of window space the ribbon takes up–especially while I’m using a laptop.