.NET From India

Office 2007 Beta 2 TR – First things you will notice

Well most of the changes seem to be visual. The splash screens have changed and so have the application icons. Some of the icons in the Ribbons seem to have changed. I am not sure what else have changed, but I can see some extra options now being available from the blog posting mode.

I will post more as I start working with the newer build.

(Posted from Microsoft Word 2007 Beta 2 TR)

Office 2007 Beta 2 TR

A new update for Office 2007 is out now, called Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh. It is something like a service pack for the Beta 2 build and extends the validity of the Beta 2 build till we can see an RC1. To install this you will need to have Beta 2 installed first. Also, it is free to download (You dont have to pay the $2 download fee for this, as of now) from the Office Preview Site.

It does take a long time to install and the setup interface is just a progress bar. So make sure you get it started when you go out for lunch..:-)

Office 2007 Beta 2 Post

I know it is old news, but Beta 2 for Office 2007 is out and it is a public beta. You can try out the new version of Office by going to Beta Test Drive Site.

One of the newer features that is added is the ability to blog from inside Word. Joe Friend has blogged about this. So I decided to give this feature a go. So I am writing this post using this feature. Suprisingly this feature does not support dasBlog or .Text now, but does support Blogger/Typepad etc.

It still is in Beta and you don’t get the whole of Word since a lot of ribbons disappears as soon as you start a new blog post document. Also if you enter your username/password wrong, the error that gets thrown is not very meaningful. Also once I got a publishing error, I had to close Word and reopen it before it would work again.

And it seems to have some problems uploading pictures. Since I did not have enough time to check, I just put in the picture from the web interface.

I assume, they would make it better as we go forward.

Office 2007 File Formats

I was playing around with Office 2007 B1 over the last 2-3 days. It is well documented that the new .x formats (docx, xlsx etc) are compressed XML formats. It is not very well documented on how you can actually take a look into them easily. The easiest way, I found, was to just rename the file as .zip, open it and extract out the contents. You now have all the internal XML data as seperate files.

As of now, I am unable to do the reverse, of taking the extracted file, changing it and putting it back into a valid office document. Maybe it is to do with the fact that I am using winrar to create my zip files and not winzip. Anyway, will play around some more and let you know the result.

Excel 12 File Size

I have been a beta tester for Office '12' for sometime now.

Something that I noticed when I was working on it yesterday is that it seems to be able to create smaller files. All the Office '12' products now have a new format (Excel's is now called xlsx). I was working on a file and when I saved it in xlsx I found it was 12KB in size. Then I resaved to xls so that I can share it with others who are on Office 2003 and found the file size was 19KB now. It is quite common to see that file sizes increase with new versions due to newer features being added, but it was suprising to find it shrinking.

I have not spent too much time actually verifying all options etc, but just an observation...