Dave Donaldson

Since repaving my laptop I took the opportunity to upgrade Office 2003 to Office 2007 and I must say I'm pretty happy with it. The UI improvements are nice, in particular the Ribbon interface. I can understand how some people will be put off by it and could have a hard time adjusting to it, but I think it finally provides the much needed upgrade that Office sorely needed.

What I like most about Office 2007 is the new Outlook. The integrated searching means I no longer need Lookout (which apparently is no longer available for download by itself) and the To-Do Bar provides me a quick view into my upcoming calendar events without having to actually open the calendar.

But my favorite feature of the new Outlook is that it handles RSS feeds out-of-the-box. I know NewsGator has provided this for awhile now, but I never used it because I tended to use an external RSS reader, such as Omea Reader. So it was nice to see how Outlook simply imported my OPML into an RSS Feeds folder in my mail file, as shown here:



This means I'm no longer using Omea Reader, and the built-in search capability I mentioned above also goes through the RSS Feeds folder just like anything else. Another cool piece of the RSS Feeds being in Outlook is that since they are treated more-or-less like another mail folder, I can read all my feeds using the Outlook Web Access client, which is pretty nice.

Overall, I'm pretty impressed with Office 2007. It wasn't a required upgrade for me, but I'm glad I did it.