Entered CNET Catalog: 05/18/2006
SKU: CNETMICROSOFTWORD2007BETA2
Manufacturer: Microsoft Corp.
CNET editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 05/23/2006
The Ribbon is dynamic, so it shape-shifts to anticipate your needs. For example, the Format tab, which lets you tweak and crop images, appears only when you're clicking on a picture. In our tests, we wished that Word would just display all the tabs at once instead of continuing to bury some tools. But we like that the rebuilt graphics engine within Office 2007 lends Word an elegant feel and enables it to make basic image adjustments without making you open an image-editing program. We expect Word 2007 to please users who design layouts for newsletters, invitations, and the like. Word 2007 beta 2 clusters formatting changes within drop-down Galleries that you can roll over to preview a font or a graphic style before finalizing it. A cover-page Gallery drops down more than a dozen choices from the Insert tab. More templates are built into Word 2007, and even more are online.
Microsoft has beefed up the tools within Word 2007 beta 2 for researchers who insert citations and for office workers who perform mail merges. Word 2007 will create cleaner HTML to serve bloggers, too. And there are new options for reviewing and protecting your work; you can better track the hidden metadata and set editing and formatting restrictions. Plus, the new XML-compatible file formats shrink document sizes for better portability and are open to developers' tweaks. You can also save backward-compatible versions of files that will work within Word 1997 and up.
For more details, see our slide shows of the impending versions of the 2007 beta 2 editions of Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint.
You can test-drive the in-progress version of Word 2007 yourself; just visit Microsoft's Web site for a download that expires in February 2007.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4
User Rating: 
4/10
Banner inteface OK for new users; production-killer for long-time Word users.
Pros: Easy for new Word users to learn.
Cons: Synonym function STILL cannot handle plurals or past-tense verbs. No capability of switching to 2003-style interface.
User Rating: 
1/10
No Help form Microsoft. Pretty but user unfriendly - Difficult to find features
Pros: At first glance - pretty
Cons: Help is completely GONE!!! You need a manual. Clean interface gone, replaced by clunky, cluttered ribbon that makes it extremely difficult to find even the simplest of features.
While at first glance the new interface has been updated to a more modern pretty look, the actual usability has gone waaaay down. The old headers of File, Edit, View, etc are gone. One must try to decifer the new ones of Home, (what the heck is home??) Insert, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review, View.
Help is complety missing on the page. How is a new user, let alone an old Word user supposed to figure things out without dragging a manual everywhere??? Help was one of the first features I taught newbies to help themselves to answers. Now where do they look for help? A manual???
Worse still, is the proliferation of icons that clutters the ribbon. Where a user was able to easily skim a list and look for what they needed, they now must read and look at the pictures which clutter a considerable amount of real estate and disrupts one's vision and flow. Making it more difficult is the new order is so different from the old and is completely counterintuitive, at least for me anyway. I found it completely user unfriendly and frustrating.
Two things could save this in the next interation.
1. Help should be restored.
2. We should be able to toggle off the irritating icons. A few are fine but this is overload.
3. Home should be replaced with something more descriptive. File would be fine.
All sizzle no steak.
I'm sticking with the old version.
User Rating: 
8/10
its all about the bottom line
Pros: no more menus to search through
Cons: will take about a week to get used to
User Rating: 
9/10
Awesome Product!
Pros: Awesome interface, nice graphics, intuitive for new users, cross-program integration
Cons: Slight learning curve, not all tabs show all the time
Although I admit there's a slight learning curve for experienced users, it's not HUGE by any means. A week or so for the basic features, and maybe a month for all the advanced features. In the long run, however, I discovered that Office makes discovering more obscure (but really useful!) features much much easier. I found it easy to go through creating a document going through all the tabs one by one. I ended up with a much more polished product than I could have created with Word 2003.
Office is getting bashed for innovative new interface, but, at least personally, I like Microsoft's initiative, and hope they continue to innovate more with their products.
