I’m finding more that I like about Office 2007, though there are still plenty of things that puzzle me. OneNote is on its way to becoming an indispensible research and organizing tool, though I can’t say that there are enormous changes that I see from early versions. It is integrating very well with IE7, and moving notes back and forth between OneNote and Word (with formatting intact) is pretty much effortless.

The latest pieces of the Office puzzle I’ve started working with is Groove. A writing partner set up a Groove server and we’ll be using it for a large project that’s coming up soon. I’m looking forward to seeing whether it’s as useful in practice as it appears it might be…the key will be to see whether there are mysterious functionality holes once we get into it. I’ll let you know.

I’m becoming more comfortable with the new Word, though it still has traits that mystify me. I like it when font size and style temporarily change when you hover over a new option, and that the formatting commands pop up right where you need them. Building a document that has a lot of links in it is dead simple. All that is good. I’m still amazed, though, that opening, saving, and printing documents don’t involve commands that are available on any of the ribbons. Moving from older versions of the software, you can remember and use commands like Alt-F-O to open a document or Alt-F-P to print. If you’re coming to the program as a new user, though, or if you just never bothered to learn the keyboard shortcuts, I’m not sure how you’ll figure out what to do with your first document. I keep harping on this, I know, but these are basics. Perhaps I’m missing something critical, but I’m amazed at some of the decisions the programmers made.

Categories: General computing