Office Word 2007 beta 2

I’m writing this on the beta version of Office Word 2007 and so far, I’m impressed with the new user interface. They’ve added a feature that I appreciate from OpenOffice that saves space where they show toolbars contextually. For example, if I create a chart, buttons relevant to charting are displayed as long as a chart has focus. They’ve also increased the relevance of the buttons as well as their accessibility with tabbed button panels grouped by function. The context-sensitive options appear as new tabs that have focus.

As far as not being able to find features, the most trouble I've had is with finding the file menu, but that has been prominently replaced by the circular office logo in the top left. Also, if you’re wondering where all the menus went, they don’t exist anymore, replaced by tool tray tabs that appear and disappear contextually.

Coolest feature asides from the UI? I’ve spent many hours playing with formatting in Office. First, they added font previews in the font list. Now, they’ve added live previews when you hover over formatting options.

A big annoyance is a strange conflict with Vongo, so if you use Starz's movie download service, you might have to rename the MSOXMLMF.dll file in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE12 just to be able to run it.