I made the mistake of telling my boss I didn’t have much to do so I’ve been using Word 07 for a week to create a user guide – gee I love writing manuals :}  Word 07 has made the task a bit more fun – but not much.

Overall, I love Word 07.  The Ribbon Bars do make things a lot more accessible but I’m not sure if it makes things any quicker.  There are a number of small bugs that are a tad annoying (table headers settings don’t stick, style preview sometimes stops working etc) but nothing that has caused me to switch back to Word.old.

It appears as though MS has relented to the pressure from Adobe to remove the PDF support from Office.  Checkout Slashdot if you want the full debate.  If I was a serious Adobe shareholder I’d be wanting someone’s head on an platter for this stupid decision.  What the heck are they thinking?  If PDF is truly an open platform like Adobe says it is then why would they ask the world’s biggest and most successful software company to pull support from one of its’ best selling products?   

Well, I guess it might have something to do with the laser sight that Microsoft have for Adobe at present – e.g. WPF = flash killer, Expression = Dreamweaver and  PhotoShop killers, XPS = PDF killer.  By reinventing the platform (with Vista & Live and .Net / WinFX) Microsoft can drive, or at least, steer users to their own products – the products that actually earn them real money – i.e. Windows & Office.  Personally, I don’t have a problem with this – it’s far preferable to the madness of having a multitude of different interests driving the platform. 

But now I’m babbling again.