I’m moving through the applications in 2007, and so far it’s a decidedly mixed experience. Outlook doesn’t show you a radically new interface until you’re ready to write an e-mail message, though I found a couple of small kinks in the way it works with servers–I had to fiddle with the mechanisms used to authenticate to an outbound server for sending a message to work in two of my accounts. I like the way the calendar works, and the journal still makes my life easier, so overall I’m happy.

Word is still the big enigma for me. I’ve got a couple of big writing projects coming up, so I’ll get much more experience with the ribbons, though I suspect that most of my writing will barely touch the surface of what the application will do. Paradoxically, folks who do serious and complex document formatting will probably benefit most from the new way of organizing functions, though they’ll also have to eat the steepest learning cure to get there. I suspect that Excel is going to be similar.

When I have to do major-league formatting , I turn to Microsoft Publisher. Here’s the interesting thing: It still has the old interface. I suspect that’s because it’s not a high-priority application for the Microsoft team, and I find that fascinating. Publisher will do most of what PageMaker was doing for me years ago (and is sufficiently similar to PageMaker in philosophy to make the shift between apps painless), and is a very nice way of creating newsletters, brochures, and other complex documents. I now wonder how long it will be before Publisher goes away completely…

The final application I find I’m using often is OneNote. There are a lot of ways to keep the kind of information you come across while doing research, but OneNote has become one of my favorites. The new version has better integration with the rest of the Office suite, and even synchronizes with my cell phone (the Samsung BlackJack), so it’s become even better. I suspect it would be truly invaluable if I were using a Tablet PC, but I’m not, and it’s still a great tool.

The Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg has written his take on the new version of Office and, as usual, he has some valuable insites. I suspect that convincing people (especially those in large organizations) to update their productivity suite is going to take a very serious marketing effort. Not everyone is as eager as I to list “guinea pig” as one of their essential skills.

Categories: General computing
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