http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx?showIntro=n
So far, I’ve been using this for a few days and I do like the new style navigation in Word and Excel. Gone are the tools>options>settings> blah and context sensitive top bars depending on what you are doing, all nicely arranged in my view. So far I’ve not encountered any major problems, but not played with the areas I think problems will arise, ie automation, mail merge and vba scripting.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/11/default.aspx
Been using this for a few days, a little disappointed that the beta is 32bit only as my test machine is running win64 and I’m too lazy to vmachine it. Install took a while as it re-indexed my mp3 collection. Nothing spotted to really shout about as the mp3 player of the house is away with Beckie at the moment. Apparently the sync is a lot better, but tbh I wouldn’t know as I never used it in previous versions. The one thing that I do like a lot is the full screen visualisations, previous versions always full screen monitor “1”. With wm11 if I have it on my second monitor and full screen visualisation it now keeps on that monitor. They seem better with cpu usage as well, taking 10% to do fullscreen maxed out resolution (1280x1024) high detail. Once again the controls are better laid out but I think will look better on Vista and patched xp versions. I was expecting the GPU to be pushed harder with all the stuff MS have been saying about making the right chip do the right job, hence a little disappointed that the visualisation is taking as much cpu as it does, maybe it will improve even more in final and on the Vista framework.
Office2007, I wouldn’t put on an in-use rig, same with IE7, but wm11 has behaved and now I’ve seen it I don’t want to go back to previous versions, so that is now on my main rig.
DT.