Office "12" : At first glance

After freeing up quite a bit of space on my Windows partition, I was able to finally install Office 2007 aka "Office 12". It takes a whopping 1.3gig of space to install Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Infopath, Outlook and all the other stuff that come with it.

It was love at first sight. The interface looks a lot kewler..no more drab formy looks! The interface is quite different from the previous versions, but, its very easy to get used to it. Basically, the old Menu style has been replaced with a more "tabbed layout".

Here are a few things I noticed at first glance:
1. Missing "File" menu : The first thing I noticed was the missing "File" menu, in its place was.. "Home". I also noticed the round button with the office logo on it, sitting at the top left corner of the screen...clicked it..and I smiled..I found the "File" menu! Strangely, Outlook still has the File menu in the main screen! When you compose a New message..it doesnt!

2. The "ALT" key effect : When you press and hold the ALT key on Windows apps, the Underline under the letters you need to press with ALT gets visible. Pressing the ALT key in Office 2K7 makes these tiny boxes containing the combination letters visible. It stays till u press ALT again.

3. Live Preview : So, now u can see what a font looks like before really using it.

4. Document File size : I didnt believe it when I read about it, so, I tried out a "hello world experiment". Typed "hello World" on an empty page in word and saved it using both 2K3 and 2K7 versions. 2K3 doc filesize - 19.5KB and 2K7 docx file size - 9.47KB.

5. Zoom : You also have a zoom slider at the right hand side bottom of the screen.

6. Help : The "Help" menu also has been popped out of the menubar. Its now a small blue round button located just below the "x" (close) button.

One funny thing I found.. the interfaces for Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access are laid out in a similar way, but, Outlook is a "mixed bag" - it has a mix of both the old style (as in previous versions) and the new kewl blue style!

These are just somethings I found at my first glance. I will be adding more parts to the review, when I really play around with it.