The Office 2007 Beta is now available

I install Office Pro 2007 Beta (with Outlook 2007 Beta) tonight. It took about a half hour to download and a half hour to install. New look is good, but there's a learning curve. In Word and Access, navigating the Windows common dialog to drill down to a specific deeply nested folder is a pain. 60+ second per folder. I may have something not set correctly.

I'm enjoying the new Word ribbons, but have found the Access ribbons to respond to my mouse movements quite slowly (so much slow that I can't really play around with my large adp file to any extent without being frustrated at the response time). Is there something I can do to speed up the response? (I've tried turning off the extended tooltips - which are cool by the way) I do love the new interface though... and the new pdf features. And the exposure of the format 'size to' and 'align to' buttons. Just the little things which will make developing more pleasant and less frustrating. I also love that it just worked and understood my entire project without any additional poking. Very well done and I very much look forward to the final product. Thanks for all your hard work so far. I will keep playing and investigating Access 2007 as much as I can.

It looks like the "Auto Repeat" functionality in the record navigation bar for tables, queries and forms has been disabled. Was this done on purpose, and can it be restored? Will the ability to change color schemes be added?

Maybe off topic for this blog, but what the heck... What's up with Infopath 2007 not having the new fancy interface (Ribbon, etc) that all the other Office products. Come on you Infopath slackers - whats the deal? :) But seriously, that really looks kinda unprofessional to have all the products in the suite look one way, and the one odd ball, InfoPath, still be old school interface. Maybe its just me, but this is just screaming "RUSH JOB".

I have just installed Beta 2. Now I can see it all together it does look great! One small thing I have noticed though - in Form/Report Design view when pressing f4 or Alt+Enter the property window displays OK but the focus is still on the current object. So you have to use the mouse to mve the focus before editing a property. It is the same thing with the field list also. (This has bugged me for ages with Access 2003)

Hi Clint After my initial installation problem, which related to Windows XP SP2 I did eventually get it to install. I have, during the past number of days days had the opportunity give the new beta version of Office 2007 a good going over, and as a result make a number of observations/comments. These are not in any particular order. My Office 2007 score 1 to 10. 10 being the best 1. I found the product, once I understood what/where all the features on the new ribbons meant, I found the product very user friendly and grouped in a logical manner. Score 9.5 2. The ribbon features with the softer colours and the rounded look are esthetically pleasing to the eye. Not the square look of old. Score 9.5 3. I did like the new access version and found it very easy to use and navigate around the new features. Score 9.5 4. Was impressed with the features of Excel/Word/Outlook. Very easy to create charts and more. Score 9.5 5. I do have one request, and that is, I hope that when Office 2007 is finally released that the user can via the Products Option (access, word and so on), personalize the colour scheme with more colour options other than the current two listed ( Windows Vista (Grey) is too dark, and the Windows XP (Blue) is too washy looking) Score 4 6. Having introduce a new look for office 2007, I am a bit amazed that when a user clicks on a dropdown on the new ribbons, that those dropdown styles look very much like the older XP and 2003 office versions. Is there an intention to also update these? Score 4 7. How will a user be able to deploy the product in a runtime mode?? • Will access have the capacity to generate installation routines?? or

• Will the user have to use a third party product, such as the SageKey product, to generate installation routines?? Score unknown Overall I found the product very good and user friendly. Overall Score 9.5 Cheers!!! Lou

I’m from Germany and develop my application since 2001. My Access Application works with Access2007, that’s good. But it works so slowly, that I don't know what to do. With Access 2003 it takes a few seconds to start, with Access 2007 it takes minutes. During starting the application there is no possibility to cancel because the access-menu is not enabled (It seems there is no performance for starting other events). You have to wait a long time. Every action longs a few seconds. On starting you can see, that every control seems to put in one after the other. Every second one control appears. Every action is very much delayed. Are there to many controls on my form? Is the code to extensive or is this the result of making Access2007 compatible with Access2003 or older? If so I think I have to develop my application again. Maybe you can post information if it is possible that there could be a problem with older applications. Thank you, Thomas

StepUP,

Not sure what you mean by the auto-repeat functionality in the nav bar. Can you elaborate? Mark,

We will look into the focus issue. Maybe we can do something... Lou,

Glad you find the new version approachable. We do have some more theme work coming down the pipe so stay tune. There will be a runtime but we are still working out the details. Thomas,

Your application should be compatible. It sounds like you are running into some low memory constraints on your machine. Are you sure the app is running on comparable hardware? From a perf perspective we think Access 2007 is looking pretty good overall--there are still lots of things to tune and tweak but our internal numbers look good. Lets investigate your hardware/memory situation first. Desert Skies,

We made big investments in accessibility. Here is a series of blog posts by a team member on the topic. blogs.gotdotnet.com/.../12142.aspx

I've taken the Office 2007 BETA which installed fine (if you ignore the 420Mb file size!) but: (1) I can't install the download on two computers - is that deliberate? On my lap top its fine, on the desktop there's a DLL missing. (2) When I try to use Access 2007 to connect to a mysql database on my web site Access reports failure to find the mysql driver in system info though I am able to connect to the database using the same driver in the Windows ODBC Administrator. Has anyone been more successful? regards Tony Heyes

Clint, By auto repeat I mean that the records scroll repeatedly while the record forward or back button remains clicked. All prior versions of Access had this.

How will the ribbon in Access 2007 effect existing Access applications? Can it be hidden on a global scale? If not, the ribbon will cause problems for forms that have been designed as full screen or near full screen in earlier versions of Access. How will Access 2007 handle custom menu bars in existing Access applications? Will custom menu bars be able to be assembled with the ease of earlier versions?

How will the ribbon in Access 2007 effect existing Access applications? Can it be hidden on a global scale? If not, the ribbon will cause problems for forms that have been designed as full screen or near full screen in earlier versions of Access. How will Access 2007 handle custom menu bars in existing Access applications? Will custom menu bars be able to be assembled with the ease of earlier versions?

I don't think all users will be happy that "Clear" type is being forced upon us. Personally I find that it contributes to eye strain. When I say "forced upon us" I realize that it can be turned off at the application level, but why should we have to do this if we have already turned it off at the operating system level? When it is turned off, Office fonts look lousy because they are obviously designed to be viewed with cleartype turned on. Not a good situation in my humble opinion.

It seems that if an Access 2003 database with custom menu bars is opened using Access 2007, the ribbon disappears and the custom menu bars display as they did in Access 2003. This doesn't appear to be the case for databases written in Access 2002 or 2000. When these are opened in Access 2007, the ribbon remains and the content of what was the custom menu bar appears under the "Addins" tab of the ribbon. Is there a reason for this inconsistency? There are lots of databases in use that were written in Access 2002 and 2000.

Quote "How will the ribbon in Access 2007 effect existing Access applications? Can it be hidden on a global scale? If not, the ribbon will cause problems for forms that have been designed as full screen or near full screen in earlier versions of Access. How will Access 2007 handle custom menu bars in existing Access applications? Will custom menu bars be able to be assembled with the ease of earlier versions? " I have tested this using an existing access database where I had a custom Menu. It worked no different than the earlier version (2002/2003). I was able to use my custom menu as designed and intended to be use.