OK, OK, OK, I admit I should know better, but when reasearching SharePoint 2007 for a client, I just couldn't stop myself from downloading the Beta 2 release of Office Pro Plus (with added caffeine, presumably) 2007. I should probably admit at this point that as a business consultant Word; Outlook and Powerpoint are my tools of the trade, and messing around with a "production" environment is never a good move. Sometimes you just need a new toy to play with on the tedious commute home from the City.
The install itself couldn't have been smoother - all I need to do was enter the product key and press the 'Upgrade' button rather than install a new copy (spotted my first mistake yet?) and 20 minutes and 1 restart later it was done.
I should have known something was amiss when I spotted the icons for the Word docs on my desktop now sport a '2003' banner across the bottom. The Office team just couldn't resist introducing a new default document format (*.docx this time), but hey, who needs standards and interoperability anyway?
But boy, was I in for a shock when I opened Word! Someone had stolen my menus, poured a good dose of growth hormones into the toolbar and hid all the really useful stuff (Open, Close, Save, New, Print and Send) under a "Office" button in the top left of the screen. The real fun started this morning, when needing to get a revised document out of the door I complete froze when I couldn't find the "Undo" button. In a few minutes of blind panic, I couldn't help feeling like I was in last night's Dr Who repeat with the Cybermen telling me I needed a brain upgrade.
Panic over, Undo and Redo have been upgraded to the "Quick Access" (ha-ha!) bar next to the "Office" button, I found that there is an incredible lack of consistency in the ways you have to interact with the new applications (and I've only been brave enough to open Word and Outlook so far).
As Office is Microsoft's cash-cow, they obviously need to keep the upgrades rolling in order to keep the cash flowing in, the contextual toolbars are helpful and native RSS support in Outlook means I can read blogs on the train. I can't help thinking though that if I'm struggling, as a hardcore laptop-wielding Office user of 12 years or more, who in their right mind would recommend an enterprise roll-out across that will have helpdesk phones across the planet ringing non-stop. I just hope M$ offer a 'classic' interaction model in the final release.
NB: This blog entry was written in WordPad whilst I prayed that Marlon doesn't give me an earful when I ask him to return me to the relatively simple world of Office 2003.