Home of the disheveled, lost and lonely

Right well here it comes folks, the ever promised Office 12 beta review. Hang on to your socks in case this takes you by surprise.

Having freshly installed Office 12 last night, I set about having a quick flick through it. First app I opened was word, and you can get a nice view of what it looks like here. Now first impressions of that are usually, what the hell happened here then, some daft sod has decided to plonk a whacking great toolbar at the top of my window! Where's the normal one gone? In true quick look fashion, I don't know where its gone, but I think its gone forever, so first thing to note is that if you don't like the toolbar, and I mean you really don't like it, then you'll not be using this software. However its worth just considering two things before you run off and scream blue murder at the nearest office user.

1: The new toolbar suprising enough, is quite easy to work with on everyday sorts of things such as bold, italic underline, font sizing, etc etc. Things like headers and footers can also be found under the Insert tab at the top, on the new menu bit. All in all, suprising enough, I'm finding myself not exactly liking the new menu, but its not something I truly hate either.
2: This is still a beta, there may well be an option in the finished version to toggle back and forth between the two menu systems, so we'll wait and see on that one. Also its worth nothing that in fact the new menu system probably only takes up about another 5% more screen space than the old one, although it looks a lot more on first glance.

Microsoft has taken the step of, to some extent, defaulting the page layout to one which they think most people will use. What I mean by that is the line spacing, paragraph formatting, and general layout of the document is slightly different from older versions of word. Not bad, but I liked it how it was, and in this beta it won't remember settings once I've changed them, so that's a bit of a niggle. They have also decided to bang cleartype on as standard. Now I think cleartype is a good idea if you are using a flat panel monitor that's not set at its maximum resolution, and things appear either slightly blurred, or a little fuzzy. Cleartype, under these circumstances, can work wonders for text, and can really make things more legible. However on a normal CRT monitor, or a flat monitor at max res, cleartype doesn't really have much bearing on how things look, and can even make them look worse, so I'm not entirely sure if this setting takes into account the type of system you are running it on, and adjusts it accordingly, or if as I suspect its a bog standard setting. If it is, I'm afraid one or two of you may find yourselves turning it off. Again though this is personal preference and not a huge problem.

The only "menu" that remains is the File menu to some extent, and even this has changed drastically from the one we know and love, clicky Next to the file menu, you will find the Quick Access Toolbar, which suprisingly enough mirrors the quick launch toolbar and lets you do the same sorts of things. i.e. whack in some icons that you use a lot, eg. spell check, so you don't have to rummage round for them. Helpfully enough the save function is already there from the off, but I would prefer the spell checker there by default as well, but you can't win them all.

As the two most used applications in office as far as I know, aside from outlook, excel was the second program that I looked at. Here is a screeny.
As you can see, its much the same sort of story here again, with the new menu at the top, orange highlighted cells for this version, which makes a change from the blue of old. Again though most of the common excel funtions, currency, autosum etc can all be found on the first menu, without any digging. Useful again for the novice user, but for the more advanced functions a little digging is required, although most can be found fairly easily and quickly.

You get the feeling that somebody has spent a bit of time thinking over this new menu system and to be honest, I can see the point behind it. Its not just window dressing this time, like the teletubby theme of xp, there is real purpose behind what's been done, and it can help you. I really wanted to not like this from what I'd read and seen of the early preview builds and people saying how much space they would be losing to the massively bloated menu. True you do lose a bit, but its not as bad as you think, and overall it can make your workflow faster and more effective. Little touches like after you have selected some text in word, you get a little popup that appears just above your cursor, which if hovered over becomes active and lets you select bold, italic, underline change text justify etc. If you don't hover over it, it disappears and is only 50% opaque to start with so isn't obtrusive, but when you do use it, its almost as quick as using the keyboard shortcut, as the buttons are right underneath your mouse cursor without you having to trek across the screen to click the button on the main bar.

Some programs like publisher have had an overhaul, but still retain the classic drop-down menu, and that's nice, hopefully Microsoft will have the sense to put the option in to revert everything back to standard should you so wish in the final version, we shall have to wait to see what comes of it.

To sum up then, not a completely interesting review, and not one of the most indepth either, hardly touching on any new features in the office suite of which I'm sure there are some, but mainly I wanted to cover the point that is in everybody's mind. Here are some other screenshots of the other apps you can get and I may do a better review when the office 12 final comes out later on this year, or early next.

Outlook

Access, Access 2

Powerpoint

Publisher