We all know how much, er... um... complaining I do on this site. Face it, I won't settle for anything less than perfection. And when it comes to Office, I'm totally merciless.

I've been using the Office 2007 Betas off and on over the past month or so, and I've been seriously impressed.

This morning I made the leap, and installed Office 2007 on my main machine. Installation was smoooooothe. Functionality is incredible. The eye-candy is PURE sugar (and high-fructose corn syrup).

Words alone will NOT describe how much better Word 2007 is than Word 2003. In fact, while I really wanted to upgrade to 2007 I just didnt' have time - and planned on upgrading Wednesday after finishing a huge project I'm working on now. (I'm sick of working on it now, and needed a break.)

But, after 20 minutes of battling Word 2003 on an existing document with HEAVY formatting, I decided that I'd had enough. I had seen enough of Word 2007 to know that some of my most DESPISED bugs were fixed. (For example, if you have a document with a few paragraphs, bulleted lists, headings, etc. in 2003 and do CTRL+A and change the font, when you do a new carriage return under existing content, you'll revert to the old font.... and other WORSE horrors that take too much energy to explain.)

At any rate. I took the leap, and installed Office 2007. Even with the time I lost during the install (which wasn't much), and having to really learn a new interface, I can confidently say that within about 3 hours of working with Office 2007 I'm now MUCH FARTHER ALONG THAN I WOULD BE with Word 2003.

My only complaints (you knew they were coming) are very simple ones  (in fact neither of them are really complaints - I just need to keep up the 'Angry' personna... ):
1) In Outlook, just get rid of the Today Page/Display if you're not going to give us any new/cool options to use for formatting that stuff. Is it just me, or is the Today screen useless? (And yeah, this isn't a complaint, it's a nit-pick. More importantly, the To-Do Bar is pwnz0r-ific, and invalidates the need for that stupid Today thingsy.
2) Man...I wish we could have the ribbon toolbars everywhere. I initially thought they were stupid (a long time ago), but I can't believe how well they work. There were a few times today where I really couldn't find options I needed, but then I sat and thought about it, and within 10 seconds I was able to find the options/tools/functionalty/etc. The Riboon Toolbars REALLY do make things much more intuitive. I just wish that OneNote and Outlook got hooked into that Ribbony goodness/love.

Frankly, the whole thing is SHINY. It's by far the best Office Experience I've ever had. It even gave me back a BUNCH of Faith in MS. This is a solid product, I'm also convinced that the user factors (in Word especially) are just brilliant - and more innovative than anything else out there. And from a complaining jerk-wad like me, that's a HUGE compliment -  but the Office Team deserves it.

(Maybe we can put together a petition to get the Office Team to give out extra Ribbon love to Outlook and OneNote? Hey, it worked for those pansy VB6 MVPs, and VB6 is so 20th century - this is a modern app. *ducks for cover*.)