A Bold New Look
The very first thing you notice about the new Word 2007 (and it's fellow Office-mates) is it's bold new look. Like the CTS-V in photo below, it's striking. The old menus and toolbars are gone. It's been replaced by what the 'softies call the ribbon. You may not like it, but you have to admire the collective corporate guts it took to completely redesign a product family that generates over $10 billion / year in revenue.

The designers & engineers at Microsoft did this for several good reasons. The biggest reason is that customers kept asking for features that were already in the product! The Word code base is nearly 20 years old, and apparently, the old menu / toolbar design doesn't scale past 100 commands or so for the majority of computer users. The other reason is that Microsoft felt Office was in danger of becoming commoditized by cheaper competitors. At any rate, Microsoft decided the usability gap between their suite and Open Office had become a little too close for comfort and they decided to widen it again.

The hardest part about using the ribbon is getting over the shock of "Where did my file menu go?". After you discover and master the Office button, you become used to the layout of the commands in pretty short order. The Blog Post ribbon tab contains all the commands that you associate with a modern blog post editor. However, the Insert ribbon tab contains the commands that you associate with a luxury/performance blogging sedan.

Heated Leather Seats

As you can see, there are a few useful features that your typical blog post editors don't have. One of my favorites is the Clip Art command. When you click on it, the Clip art gallery from the office web site appears in a window pane. Then you can search for whatever tickles your fancy and find a decent photo or clip art to complement your post. After you insert the photo, the Picture Tools tab should appear on the ribbon and you'll have ability to crop, resize, recolor, add drop shadows, and do other basic image manipulation tasks. And in minute or two you'll have a professional looking photo in your blog post! No more copy & pasting pictures into image editors. No more saving the file to your desktop and then uploading it to the server your blog is on! No more futzing with limited web based text editors! Even if you hate all things Microsoft, please do yourself a favor and get a decent offline blog post editor (like BlogJet).

(to be continued…)