Office 2007 has a nifty new setup wizard that looks, well, almost Mac-like. Check it out:
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Monthly Archives: August 2006
New Office 2007 Feature #2: Snazzy New Setup Wizard
Create Your Own Xbox 360 Games
From a PCWorld article:
A new game development platform from Microsoft allows anyone to create games for its Xbox 360 console, the company said today [August 14].
Typically, console games are designed by large studios that must pay high prices to buy development kits in order to write games for consoles. Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio Express is a new development kit that will be released in beta form in August. It will be available for free to anyone using a Windows XP PC. The kit is designed for game developer novices as well as studios, Microsoft said.
[...]
The XNA Game Studio Express development environment is based on Visual Studio Express and .NET, and allows developers to create games simultaneously for Xbox 360 and Windows XP.
Microsoft expects the final non-beta version of the development platform to become available by the end of the year. Another version of XNA Game Studio Express designed for professional game developers will become available in early 2007, the company said.
The part about simultaneous Xbox/Windows development sounds pretty cool. It’ll be interesting to see whether this platform takes off with game developers.
Screenshots: The Word 2007 Ribbon
Here it is: 8 screenshots, one for each tab of the Word 2007 Ribbon (not including the “context tabs”). Enjoy!
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Dell’s Back-to-School Laptop Giveaway
Dell is giving away 12 free laptops every day from July 27 to August 31 as part of their back-to-school 2006 instant win game. Worth a shot, methinks.
After playing a few times, I think I know why they can afford to do this: every time you play, they survey you with a computer-related question or two or three. If a lot of people play, I can imagine this data being quite valuable to them! But personally I don’t really care if Dell knows what types of computer equipment I purchased in the past year; but some people might.
I’ll let you know if I win anything. 
New Office 2007 Feature #1: The Ribbon
For feature #1, I’m going to be talking about the Ribbon: the revolutionary new UI that will, for the most part, be replacing menus and toolbars throughout the Office 2007 suite.
With the new Ribbon, commands such as Paste and Find are now categorized into tabs and further categorized into groups. (Click here for a screenshot of what the Ribbon looks like in Microsoft Word.)
To sum it up in four words: I really like it. It feels more natural to use than complex dialog boxes, and already I’ve discovered a some cool features that were previously unknown to me. That may be because they are indeed new features, or maybe because those features which are now prominently featured on the Ribbon were scattered across and hidden deep within the Office 2003 UI.
On the other hand, there are other features that I have trouble finding right away; however, Microsoft does include help documentation that includes a list of the old Office 2003 commands and their new Ribbon locations, which is really nice.
So although the Ribbon will help us find new features, I think it’s also going to take a while to re-find the features we’re already familiar with.
Though using the Ribbon is a little different at first, you easily get used to it. Soon we’ll probably wonder how we lived without it.
I’ll be posting screenshots of what the Ribbon looks like in the various Office 2007 applications soon!