Get ready for more Office 12 hype

The company I work for is a big MSFT partner and I've been invited to do early user trials. I'll be sure to let everyone know how that goes. :)

I'm a dinosaur who still uses MS Office 2000. It does everything I want to do. If I were to make a change I would move to OpenOffice before I would buy Office 12.

Here in the office we have all workstations equiped with OO instead of M$ Office, OpenSource Software that does everything we need so as you can see the non-spent budget we had for M$ Office is now spent in other areas of the IT dept.

I've been using Office 12 for about 3 weeks now as my primary office environment. It's totally different. It's not entirely functional though, so I may have to uninstall it and revert in order to do some things. All the bugs I have posted are being addressed in some manner by actual people, so that's nice to see.

Pluses: Outlook 12 is really nice, lots of enhancements and built-in indexing like LookOut.
Word 12 is highly functional and really follows the new UI paradigm. Some of the functions now take 2 clicks instead of digging through 10 menu items. Very nice.
Excel 12 is similar to Word. Making edits to a chart involves no right-clicking. Very nice. Some charts are unhappy, but they have re-done the rendering engine.
PowerPoint 12: Broken. If you use it a lot, you will be unhappy. This is one reason I have to revert.
OneNote 12: Good stuff, pretty similar to OneNote 2003. This app is really great for meetings, especially with a Tablet PC.

I haven't really tried some of the other apps yet. The thing about PowerPoint is that it looks like a complete ground-up rewrite. I am very excited to see how it turns out, but for now, it's unusable.

Anyhow... that's my $0.02.
TTFN

Too bad for the "industry" (I really mean microsoft). Businesses are finding out that what they have is good enough. Windows 2000 would be the best OS ever if it had cleartype. Office 2000 is the best office ever. Everyting past that is fluff.