Some of the Best Beta 2 Resources

So you started downloading Office 2007 Beta 2 yesterday but it hasn’t finished yet. Or you had an error during the download or installing the build. Or maybe you’re not quite ready to take the leap and install beta software yet.

No problem! There are a lot of new resources available to give you a sense of what’s possible with the new user interface. Most of these are useful whether you’re installing the beta or not.

Here are six of my favorite Beta 2 resources:

Office User Interface Video Tour: This is a live action movie in which Julie Larson-Green and I give you a quick tour of the UI and some of the thinking that went into it. The build we were using for the video is a lot older than Beta 2, so you might notice some rough spots. Nonetheless, a number of people have said that they found it worthwhile.

Office User Interface Live Demo: This brand new Flash-based demo walks you through the UI and gives you a chance to play with it (including clicking through tabs, giving Live Preview a whirl, etc.) This is probably the best way to get a sense of exactly what the Beta 2 UI looks like and how it works.

Office Compatibility Pack Beta 2: Here’s where you can download the compatibility pack to allow Office XP and 2003 to read and write the new Office 2007 file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.) Of course, you can also save documents in the 97/2000/XP/2003 file formats directly from Office 2007 as well.

Office 2007 Learning Portal: Here you can see some of the many resources available to get you up-to-speed on Office 2007. There are free e-learning online courses you can take (including Introduction to the New Office User Interface.) You can also access free book content and sign up for classroom learning near you.

MSDN Office Developer Center: All of the information to learn about the new developer opportunities built on top of Office 2007 are brought together in this great portal.

MSDN Ribbon Developer Portal: This is an entire developer portal devoted to customizing and extending the new user interface through RibbonX. I’m so excited that this one finally exists!

Getting the 2007 Office System Beta

If you didn’t catch my post yesterday, the news is this: Beta 2 of the 2007 Office system is available for free and immediate download from the Office Preview site at https://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx. I hope you’ll give it a try!

My apologies to everyone who had download trouble yesterday. The team was surprised and overwhelmed by the interest in downloading Office and they’re hard at work increasing capacity. (I know they doubled it just between yesterday morning and yesterday evening.)

This is the first time we’ve offered a beta of Office for download outside of the private beta test, and so I think none of us knew precisely how much interest to expect. If your download didn’t complete, please try again today or in a few days.

Once you’ve got the build installed, you can start discussing it in the Office Discussion Groups.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  I already have the same problem with activation. It must be the load on Microsoft's servers, so I'm going to give it a week or so before I try again.
  
  By the way, this is an incredibly great release. Keep up the good work!
  
  Cheers!
  
  Pharod

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  I think I already know the answer to this question but I will ask anyway. Are there any plans to provide "RibbonX" as a standalone control for use in general non-office-extension applications?

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  Thanks for the info on Office Compatibility Pack Beta 2. Hadn't seen it elsewhere on the web site. Also is FrontPage 2007 getting released soon?!
  
  Love the new toys (errrr, the new "tools").

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  For those users who had problems downloading using the SmartSource app, try this:
  Reregister for the betas and on the screen that you get the product keys, click on the product name's link to start the download.  
  
  ...It worked for me - now to figure out this activation thing...

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  Ooops, now I know I've been under a rock: just saw that FrontPage 2007 will never exist and FrontPage will be discontinued for Microsoft Expression Web Designer - which I knew of, but not as a replacement. Keep up the good work!

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  I am having trouble starting up Outlook 2007, msncon.dll missing. I have outlook live with my hotmail account for my outlook 2003, but it seems not working with outlook 2007. Any help?
  
  I cannot activate it as well.

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  I think that scrolling on the styles on the tab, should scroll the styles, NOT THE TABS!
  
  P.S. I have a whole bunch of comments about the drawing in PowerPoint and Word, is there anyone around the world that has a word in Micrsoft, and intrested in hearing my comments?
  Yes? Who? where?
  NO?! Then I think I will Unfortunately have to stay with the old fashiond Office, which I can easily work around with drawing.

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  LGFN: The PowerPoint team has a blog where you can post comments.  See the link to the left under Microsoft Office Blogs.

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  Thanks Jensen,
  
  Do you mean the PowerPoint & OfficeArt blog? If so, then I'm sorry to say that the last post posted there was sometime in April, seems that no one there is intrested in any comments people have to say.
  
  Well, just to say, they DID really an excellent job on new drawing features, but on the second hand It's now very very very (yes, I repeat)very uncomfortable to work on drawings.
  
  And as an drawing-in-Word expert my opinion is,
  they should reconsider the whole UI of it (or mabey that's your job, Jensen).
  
  Wating for a reply.

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  Jensen,
  
  Is there a place I can post feedback on the UI - I love 97% of it, but would like to see a few small conveniences from older versions put back in.
  
  For example, two things I never realized I used all the time until they were gone last night when I installed Beta 2: the Open icon, and the Close MDI-Window "x".
  
  I've had to go into each app and modify the QAT and add Open and Close icons.
  
  Also, when I told Word 2003 to stop using personalized menus, ALL 2003 apps stopped. However, when I customize the Word 2007 QAT, it wasn't changed in Excel or Powerpoint. Is there a reason for that? Can there be an option on the Customization tab "Publish changes to all Office applications"?
  
  Anywho, I don't want to fill up the comments with all of this, I'm hoping there's a feedback site somewhere that I can funnel this through - or maybe I can just email you, since you seem to be the guy in charge. :)
  
  --Kevin Ulland

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  I see that on the Drawing Tools -> Fomat tab there's no difference (on most options) between Shape Effects and Text Effects, I think this is a little mistake.

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  I cannot activate Office on Windows Server 2003 R2 or Vista.

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  Jensen,
  
  This blog is much harder to read after the download, the letters look like those in a bad photocopy.
  
  I only installed Visio - b/c it's a work computer. (couldn't risk effecting office itself, but this comp doesn't have Visio :-)
  
  Or was it just a coincidence?

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  Chris C, that's because the type Cambria was installed with Visio. Unfortunately, those new fonts that comes with Office 2007 are only optimized for LCD displays, CRT users are left out in the cold on this one. I did however note that they've updated the fonts to v1.0, and Calibri looks a lot better now on CRT, than with previous versions.
  
  So, there's some hope that the rest will get the finishing touches that makes them useable on CRT as well. Maybe Jensen can shred some light on the font type situation?

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  Office 2007 looks like it will be a great product, and I'm very impressed with what I've seen so far in beta 2, and it'll be a worthwhile upgrade from Office 2003. The new UI is excellent!
  
  Unfortunately, the other two Microsoft betas that I've tried recently (Vista and Media Player) are not as inspiring, and may well be worse than their predecessors.
  
  It's funny, because Office always seemed to go its own way from Windows, which is contrary to what you'd expect. It always seemed to break the UI rules and introduce rules of its own. In the past, I've been disappointed by that, but this time I think that the Office UI is better than that of Windows (Vista and XP).

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  Wait a minute... something is missing here, were is the dropdown for Redo? where could that dissapear, I looked around the whole Office, even looked under my desk, just found an old mouse with a long tail :-).

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  So for the average user, customizing the toolbars in previous versions was very user- friendly.  Simply click and drag.  This new interface appears to only allow you to customize the QAT.  What about the other ribbons.  Surely, I can eliminate icons that i never use and place the ones I use frequently where I want them.  Please someone help me do this.  This is extremely important.  I can see my enterprise (thousands of users) REALLY resisting this excel if you can't customize ribbons.

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  Ribbon Developer articles are great but is it possible to create a small preview for those button images? The list is OK, but it would be nice to see those images too.

• Anonymous
  May 25, 2006
  Did anyone else notice that they can access Exchange Server 2003 public folders without permission using Office 2007? :)

• Anonymous
  May 26, 2006
  I'm hoping for a pointer so thought this would be a good place to start.
  
  I've got 2 questions
  1) Is there a source for the imageMSO names that are available in Office 2007. I found some in this and other blogs but is there a complete list or a way within Office 2007 to find them?
  
  2) Is there any way (without building a C# add in or something) to use my own button images?  In the "old days" I created a document template, was able to build a toolbar and copy/paste a button image. Is there any equivalent mechanism in the new Office?
  
  Thanks
  Neil

• Anonymous
  May 26, 2006
  Beta 2 of the 2007 Microsoft Office System was released on May 23. This is a public beta, meaning anyone...

• Anonymous
  May 29, 2006
  Jense
  Jensen Harris has a post on his site entitled “tell us what you think of office 2007 BETA 2”....

• Anonymous
  May 30, 2006
  I downloaded and installed office 2007 beta 2 without any problems, I was not able to activate it.  Outlook crashed every other time I tried to reply, each restart took away from my 50 uses.  Once I got down to about 12 uses left, I decided to uninstall it.  Unfortunately I installed it as an upgrade, so I had to reinstall office 2003.  Now I can't re-activate office 2003, same message "unable to find an active internet connection" or something similar.  Other than that, office 2007 is really pretty, that's about all I had time to notice.

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  June 02, 2006
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• Anonymous
  June 06, 2006
  Outlook 2007 crashes everytime I get a new message.  Plus it isn't too happy when you upgrade from a previous version.  Seems to leave out dll's.  Decent app once it's running though.

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  June 10, 2006
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  June 10, 2006
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• Anonymous
  June 14, 2006
  I have a question, I have over 2000 fonts installed; and recently installed MS Office 2007 Beta2. Everything works well, but when I try to change my font; the font preview window won't show my fonts?? please help??

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  June 17, 2006
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  June 28, 2006
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• Anonymous
  July 03, 2006
  Why does the size chart say that Office Professional Plus 2007 is 550 MB but when I go to download it it only comes up as 440.5 MB. Why is this?

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  July 13, 2006
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