Microsoft Word 2007 beta 2

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Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 4 reviews
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Product summary

Word 2007 serves up new choices for editing, protecting, and jazzing up documents with graphics-heavy layouts--all within a dramatically new interface.

CNET editors' take

Reviewed by: Elsa Wenzel
Reviewed on: 05/23/2006

As Microsoft has tacked features onto Word over the past 17 years, each new version made you hunt harder than the last to find newly located functions. Word 2007 is the company's attempt to arrest this feature bloat. Rather than continue to nest new features within a hodgepodge of drop-down menus and toolbars, Microsoft scrapped the old interface and started from scratch with Word 2007's layout. Microsoft's impending update to its word processing app puts more tools front and center within a tabbed Ribbon across the top of the page. The Ribbon takes up more screen real estate than did the banner of menu headers in past editions of Word, but that also spares you mouse clicks. In our tests of the 2007 beta 2 incarnation, we liked the clarity of the Ribbon's enlarged, labeled icons. The tabs include Home, Insert, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review, and View.

The interface of Word 2007 is organized around a dynamic, tabbed Ribbon of features.

The Ribbon is dynamic, so it shape-shifts to anticipate your needs. For example, the Format tab, which lets you tweak and crop images, appears only when you're clicking on a picture. In our tests, we wished that Word would just display all the tabs at once instead of continuing to bury some tools. But we like that the rebuilt graphics engine within Office 2007 lends Word an elegant feel and enables it to make basic image adjustments without making you open an image-editing program. We expect Word 2007 to please users who design layouts for newsletters, invitations, and the like. Word 2007 beta 2 clusters formatting changes within drop-down Galleries that you can roll over to preview a font or a graphic style before finalizing it. A cover-page Gallery drops down more than a dozen choices from the Insert tab. More templates are built into Word 2007, and even more are online.

Word 2007 features support for blogging, with cleaner HTML coding than in the app's predecessors.

See more CNET content tagged:: Microsoft Word 2007,; Microsoft Word,; beta,; tab,; layout

User reviews

Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 4 reviews
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4.0 stars

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful

"its all about the bottom line"

by oludir on July 26, 2006

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2.0 stars

"Banner inteface OK for new users; production-killer for long-time Word users."

by Hal Day on June 30, 2008

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0.5 stars

"No Help form Microsoft. Pretty but user unfriendly - Difficult to find features"

by meevalerie on August 10, 2007

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Microsoft Word 2007 beta 2

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Microsoft Word 2007 beta 2

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