Office 2007

By Jerry Pournelle

June 26, 2006

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Having dumped Office 2007 along with Vista on the theory that testing two betas is only a good idea if everything is working properly, I installed Office 2007 on Satine, which is to say, on the Vista machine but with Windows XP entirely restored. Once again, Norton Save and Restore worked flawlessly.

The first thing to note is that if Office 2003 is present, Office 2007 doesn't eliminate it: The Start Menu lists both versions. This was a pleasant surprise; I had nowhere been asked whether I wanted it this way. On the other hand, I hadn't been told that the installer wanted to dump the old version of Office.

Installation was smooth and without incidents. Microsoft Word 2007 opened properly, and I loaded this column--well, the three parts I had already written--without incident. The title bar read "2006 June.doc (Compatibility Mode) - Microsoft Word". I presumed that meant that it saved in Word 2003 format, and this turned out to be correct.

The text was ugly; see Figure 1. My problem with the text aesthetics of Office 2007 under Vista hadn't been due to Vista. By this time I had discovered the location of the "Zoom" control: It's down in the lower right corner of the screen. There are click controls and a slider that work quite well. The clicker zooms in 10 percent increments. Clicking on the Text Percent number opens a control window in which you can type arbitrary zoom percents, control page width, and so forth--and it gives you a preview of what it will look like in the zoom number you have selected. Very nice indeed. This turns out to be very logical and very easy to get used to once discovered.

Figure 1: A document in Word 2007 in the default view (Print Preview). It's not obvious given the text size here, but it's ugly.

Zooming in the text made it look a little better, but not as good as it looks in Word 2003.

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