Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

I downloaded and installed Office 2007 Beta 2 and I'm on freaking Mars. I'm totally lost. Everything's changed, it's like someone broke into my office and moved everything.

Good stuff:

• Office 2003 Hot keys and Menu keys work - I typed Alt-T|O to get to Tools|Options and got a nice tool-top letting me know that I was on the right track. (see image)
• One you accept that everything's be moved, you can find most stuff in two clicks. For example, I always want to select cells in Excel then "Zoom to Selection." Now I click View and there's a big "Zoom to Selection" button.
• Hotkeys Galore - Just press Alt and you'll get subtle, but obvious overlaid hotkeys on all the actionable things. Now you can more easily string together Hotkey Streetfighter Combos like "Alt-V,Z,T" enter for "Zoom to Text Width" in Word. (see image)
• Awesome tooltips - Giant help for nearly every thing you could hover over.
• Live Preview - Finally something for my Pentium 4 with 2 gigs of RAM to do. This rocks.
• New Outlook - The new Outlook is better in a number of subtle ways.
• Calendar - Much softer, easier to look at and better use of space.
• The To-Do Bar is brilliant, showing me what's coming up no matter where I am.
• Much better category support (see image)
• RSS Support in Outlook ala Newsgator -

Weird stuff:

• The installer said it would uninstall Office 2003, and it didn't. I ended up in a weird side-by-side place where I could run everything but Outlook 2003. So, I ran the Office 2003 uninstaller. Mistake #1. That boogered up Office 2007 - however, when I ran 2007 again, the MSI installer repaired all of Office 2007's stuff automatically (albeit slowly) and I was back in business.
• The new Office Button - I'm used to double-clicking on the upper left corner of the window and closing the application.
• Good luck with your Outlook Add-ins, nearly all mine totally freaked out and are now disabled.
• Right click on the Status Bar in any application and tell me what the checkboxes on the left mean versus the "On|Off" on the right. Now ask your non-technical spouse. (see image)
• Word Documents that have extensive existing styles don't get those styles respected in the "Quick Style Set" ribbon bar. Instead a default set of themed styles are suggested. This could cause one with a rich existing set of styles to shoot themselves in the foot. They could fill the "Quick Style Gallery" with lots of manual right-clicking though then save the "set." It'd have been nice to have a better way to specify existing styles en masse as a set.
• The mini-toolbar that pops up as you select text is great for simple docs, but promotes bad habits (not using styles) in larger documents.

Very weird stuff:

• Outlook 2007 Beta 2 registers itself as a system-wide handler for the feed:// protocol, a 'protocol' that the IE7/RSS Team disagrees with and has decided against supporting. I'll post about this oddity separately.

All in all stability of Beta 2 is iffy (I've crashed 6 times in 60 minutes and got a "not implemented" dialog four times) but I'm VERY excited about the possibilties of this new User Interface style and what it means for the future.