Office 2007 Beta 2 Thoughts
Er - actually, this probably focuses more on Outlook 2007 Beta 2, because that is the program by FAR that I use the most, but since Outlook is still part of Office, I suppose it fits. Anyway, here are some of my thoughts (good and bad) about Office 2007 Beta 2.

1. THANK YOU for including the subject of an RSS feed in the preview pane. I can't tell you how frustrating that was to not have it present in the previous version, and have the message list window cut off the subject if it was longer than a certain number of characters.

2. On the same subject of RSS feeds, why is it that there is still no option to be able to pull down the entire article? Isn't the whole point behind RSS to have an easy place to read things? If I'm subscribed to an RSS feed, the LAST thing I want to do is "Click here to read the FULL article", especially when the ONLY thing that the feed includes is a short one-line preview of the article. This makes me want to go back to using intraVnews. I may still go back to that. It's free (for personal use), and actually has an option to pull down the entire feed. If the feed is an actual web page? I can tell it to download pictures and all kinds of stuff. Why isn't this an option here? Oh, and DON'T tell me that the option to "download article and any enclosures" is the solution. All that does is download the content and place an html page link in the feed. Oh, BTW, if I click on that IE icon? I get a nice "This file cannot be previewed because there is no previewer installed for it". Thanks. Just another reason to switch back to intraVnews.

3. Why are there STILL no other Theme choices than the UGLY Sky Blue and Slate Gray? Oh, sorry, you call it Windows XP (Blue), and Windows Vista (Gray), as if that identifies them any better, or makes them look any better. Both of them stick out like a sore thumb. I've got the Silver theme for XP, so why can't Office use the same OS theme that I am using? Who in their right mind would want to use a Baby blue interface for Outlook (and the rest of Office)? I certainly hope that there will be more choices for RTM.

4. Thank you for fixing the text color on the status bar. I use the Slate Gray theme, and prior to Beta 2, the text was black. Black text against a slate gray theme, well, doesn't work too well! It's now white text. I'm still not happy with the theme choices, but at least this makes things visible.

Whew! I have a point about another program besides Outlook! That makes the title valid! Woohoo!
5. OneNote 2007 gives you an option to install OneNote Mobile 2007. I like that there is a OneNote Mobile, but I HATE how horribly ineffective it is as a notation application. The built-in Notes feature of Windows Mobile 5 does MUCH better. Why is there no option to ink/draw in OneNote Mobile? At least the fuzzy text was fixed. In the previous version, typing text resulted in fuzzy text until you went to the next line, or did something else. That was annoying.

OK, that's all for now. Post your comments of your thoughts of Office 2007! Don't have the beta? Get it from the Office 2007 Preview site. As far as I know, this is an Open beta, so anyone can get it.
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx
- posted by Ben Winzenz @ 8:41 AM