I have just spent the day at a Microsoft Launch event for Vista and Office 2007 aimed at IT Professionals and Developers. CES, this ain’t, but I came away with some useful information and much more concrete support for my continued advice to all clients, friends, family, and String Foo readers: Hold off on Vista, upgrade immediately to Office 2007.

If you’re new to this blog, let me sum up my recommendation on Vista: the OS is not worth the pain and expense of upgrading unless it comes with a new machine. You should not buy a retail copy of Vista and attempt to install it on any PC that wasn’t bought within the past year, and even then, your chances are dicey. Not only is a retail copy of Vista shockingly expensive, you don’t get much bang for your buck. Some pretty eye candy: yes. Some nice, long overdue default security features: true. But that’s it. Today’s product demonstrations simply supported my own experience with the product: Vista is not worth the price and trouble of an upgrade.

A complete 180, however, with Office 2007. Today’s demonstrations by Microsoft simply underscored and strengthened my belief that Office 2007 is an unusual release for Microsoft: Office 2007 offers a lot for the money, and you should upgrade immediately.

The ribbon interface is fantastic, despite the moderate learning curve [see the ribbon in action here]. But the truly Special Sauceâ„¢ is with the Galleries and live updates that make formatting a breeze. While Office 2007 really doesn’t offer anything new, per se, it does a fantastic job of exposing and, more importantly, simplifying the features that were already there.

Gallery is a truly different animal. In just about every place you touch that has to do with formatting, you get a set of canned, well-designed templates and styles. The net effect is that with a click or two, you can create slick looking documents and presentations that look better than those that took you hours to noodle into submission in previous versions of Office.

Microsoft offers a free trial of Office so you can evaluate the benefits for yourself. The trial is downloadable here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Tips & Tricks . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.