Office 2007 beta testing

I'm on the beta testing team for Office 2007 (yup, that seems to be the official name of it now). And, I just got an email from Microsoft saying "... as a result of publicly disclosed Office "12" client application features and content, we are now allowing all testers to
discuss publicly or blog about the features in the Office "12" client
applications. This specifically refers to client-side features only in
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, InfoPath, Access, Project,
Visio and Publisher."

So, I guess I'll be doing just that....blogging away. But, even tho they say it's ok, I'm still afraid I will blog about something that's not really blog-allowed. But, I'm gonna try to do this without breaking any rules.

Of course, this all depends on how much time I have. But, so far, I'm having fun with the beta version of Office 2007. The interface includes this new "ribbon" that is supposed to make everything easier to find. But, my experience has been that it's not so easy for those of us who are so used to the old menus. For example, it took me about 20 minutes to find Tools>Options in Excel cuz I wanted to see what new options we might have...but there's no Tools menu anymore, so I kept clicking on every button on the ribbon and nothing close to what I wanted was appearing. But, there is still a File menu, so I went there, and glory be, at the bottom there's a button that says Excel Options. Well, when I clicked it, I got an error, but when I OK'd the error, there I was in Tools>Options. And, yes, there are quite a few new options.

Later on that.....