Many of my friends are prone to complain about Microsoft. They are the Great Satan, incapable of the creative ingenuity and cool designs of Apple. But though Apple may be winning the operating systems war (may), they haven't come close to designing software that even comes close to Microsoft's Office. And now Microsoft has taken a huge leap forward in the battle for superiority. I've downloaded the Beta version of Office 07 and have not been able to stop playing with it. You can see the screenshot of the redesign below--it's far more user-friendly than the drop-down menus of previous verisons, especially for Excel.
But my favorite part isn't in Word. It's Outlook, which has an RSS feed built in, which means I can keep my calendar, email, to-dos, contacts, and daily reads all in the same place. This is the sort of convenience that I have been looking for. In fact, I've recently made the switch to Firefox for a number of reasons, but I anticipate the next version of IE will integrate with Outlook and other Office programs much more easily, which will probably make me switch back.
The download is slow because the program is huge but it's been worth it. My initial review: absolutely awesome.