I started working with the new Office 2007 Beta over the weekend and I have to say that for the most part I really like the changes. There are two changes that I think will stir the most interest. First, Time New Roman has been replaced by the san serif font Calibri as the default Office font. Even though people are used to Times this change really makes sense. Serif fonts (Times is one) are better suited for print and I believe Microsoft is anticipating that a lot of the work people do in Office 2007 will be for screen rather than print. The drawback is that this will probably require some type of Windows update down the line for XP users who don’t immediately update to Office 2007 or Windows Vista.

. Second, if you learned to use functionality embedded in the menu system be forewared that Office 2007 is a somewhat radical departure from what you have become used to - the menus are gone for the most part, replaced by context based ribbon strips and tabs. The “ribbons” are relatively easy to get used to in most of the programs, although I think Access users will need a refresher on where everything is.Besides being generally curious about the changes I was really looking forward to checking out Visio and Outlook, because I spend a lot of time in those programs. I am a big fan of Getting Things Done fan so I was pleased to see that implementing the the GTD workflow in Outlook (without a plugin) seems to be easier. Visio however left me a little puzzled. First, it didn’t get the same UI upgrade that Outlook, Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Access got. In fact on the surface there isn’t anything significantly different. Second, there are still no default IA (information architecture) stencils. Why??? There are site map and conceptual web site stencils, but no one I know uses these. This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me since there are several solid stencil sets out there. Garrett Dimon and Nick Finck to name a couple have great IA stencils that could have been incorporated (with permission) as stencils. Seems odd that a simple change like that was left off the table.