u235

Great! I'm SOOO not looking forward to the "upgrade" at my office. Word already has too many dysfunctional bells and whistles in the 2003 version. Outlook is a quirky malfunctioning piece of shit. I can hardly wait to see how they've "improved" on it. Sheesh!

I'm quite the power-user when it comes to Word and Excel and after a couple days of adjustment, I found that I liked the new interface... a LOT. In fact, my only complaint is that they changed all the default text and border colors to a more "pigment-dyed" look but since the standard color-picker is still just another click away it's no biggie.

Of course, I use Word and Excel a LOT so YMMV depending on what You do and how frequently You use it. The main area of change that I absolutely love is how styles and formatting are handled now. I used styles extensively in older versions of Office, but they were always a real bear to setup from scratch. IMO the implementation and accessibility of styles in O2K7 is simply how it should have been all along.

Built-in PDF publishing is nice too.

As for screen real-estate, hide the ribbon if You don't need to see it all the time. :)

BTW, it's not like MS doesn't recognize that some people have hesitations about the new office. They have a 60-day free trial You can download. That's what I did and when it ran out I simply bought a license. And I'm not talking about dropping $300-500 like in the old days. Rather $120 for the home/student version for *three* computers.

I suppose I could go on, but I really need to leave for work now. :P

The previous message was brought to you by a Microsoft clone. The new UI is gay not ghey.