If you’re interested in Office 2007 Beta 2, I’ve posted a screen shot gallery here: Office 2007 up close and personal. Accompanying analysis here: 10 tough questions about Office 2007.

The more I dig into the software, the more little things I find. I’m finding the 80–20 rule to be highly applicable. About 80% of the everyday tasks I do in Office are easier, thanks to the rejiggered interface. The other 20% take a little searching. It took quite a while for me to find the AutoText entries in Word, for instance. They’re now incorporated into something called the Building Blocks Organizer. It took me a few minutes to find out how to add an AutoText button to the Quick Access toolbar.

One interesting note is that the keyboard shortcuts for Office 2003 menu choices generally work exactly the same in Office 2007, even though the latter has replaced all menus and toolbars with the new Ribbon. Here’s what you see in Word, for instance, if you tap Alt, I, A (the keyboard version of Insert, AutoText):

Even more bizarre is that if you finish the menu sequence by typing X ( for AutoText), Word displays the contents of the AutoText tab of the AutoCorrect dialog box. Except there’s no AutoText tab on the AutoCorrect dialog box in Word 2007! So if you click another tab, there’s no way to get back to where you were.

Ah, the joys of beta-testing.

Brad Kellett read my earlier post in which I mentioned that Word 2007’s new blogging feature seems to send posts into the WordPress ether. Brad says there’s another explanation:

I don’t believe that this is a problem with posts disappearing, just that they are getting a post date of far into the past – in my case, it was December 1969. For everyone having trouble posting from Word 2007 to a WordPress blog, fire up your admin console and head to Manage > Posts and change the browse month dropdown to whatever is the abstract date.

Absolutely right. In my case, on a notebook running Vista Beta 2, the posts were dated November 1999.

Not sure I want to go back to either of those dates, to be honest. Thanks for the pointer, Brad!

I don’t know how many people have been slamming Microsoft’s servers today (and those of its online partner, LTG), but I’m guessing a huge number of people want that Office 2007 beta. I was able to download my copies just fine this morning, as soon as they were available. But for the past few hours, I’ve received a variety of errors when trying to reach the servers. Just when I thought I had finally made it, the server surrendered completely:

It must be incredibly hard to engineer a website to handle surges of traffic like this.

Anyway, you might want to wait a day or two.

If you feel like living dangerously, you can download the Office 2007 [*] beta code here. If you don’t already have the .NET Framework 1.1 installed, you’ll have to download and install it first.

[*]Yeah, I know that’s not the official name.

I missed this two weeks ago when it first appeared on Inside Office Online, but it appears the official name of the next version of Office has changed:

The next version of Office is officially known as the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Little ‘s’. Year before the product. Exactly 32 characters. Naturally, Office Online editors balked. When newspapers, trade journals, bloggers and even company executives are saying Office 2007, you assume that’s going to hold muster with branding. It’s not. When even SteveB himself gets flame mail (OK, maybe only a flicker mail, but still an e-mail) reminding him to use the proper wording, you know it’s serious.

I predict this will go exactly nowhere. Unless you’re a salmon, swimming upstream just wears you out, and this attempt to change the established convention for naming computer software is most certainly an upstream swim.

Windows 95, Office 95, Office 97, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Office 2000, Office 2003, Windows Server 2003.

And they want to break that string with 2007 Microsoft Office? It’ll never catch on.

There’s an annoying bug in Outlook 2007 that causes it to crash when opening or previewing certain messages. That’s the bad news. And, I hasten to add, it’s not unexpected. This is, after all, beta software.

The good news is that the program closes itself, sends a quick ping to Redmond, and reopens in seconds. And this helpful message appears:

OK, I’m ready for Beta 2.

I’ve been poking around in the Windows registry (don’t try this at home), looking at the keys that hold various settings for the Office 2007 beta. Now, I’m used to seeing globally unique identifiers, or GUIDs, used throughout the registry. In Windows, these consist of 32 characters, broken up into one group of 8 characters, followed by three groups of 4 characters, and a final group of 12 characters, surrounded by curly braces, and separated by hyphens. Like so:

{3F2504E0-4F89-11D3-9A0C-0305E82C3301}

The point of GUIDs is that they’re supposed to be pseudo-random, thus virtually eliminating the possibility that two software components will use the name number to define themselves.

So, look at these GUIDs that appear under the current user’s key for the current beta of Office 2007:

Not exactly random, is it? In fact, the six characters at the end of each GUID are practically L33t5p34k.

Although I can’t prove it, I suspect that the reason these settings are expressed as GUIDs is for obfuscation, to keep people like you and me from looking at them and possibly tweaking their settings to change the look, feel, and behavior of Office.

Anyone know what those keys are really for?

Update: Please note this offer has expired. No, you can’t get a free copy of Office by following these links anymore. Sorry you missed it.

Microsoft is giving away copies of Microsoft Office Small Business Management Edition, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Outlook with Business Contact Manager Update, and Small Business Accounting 2006.

What’s the catch? You have to watch three live webcasts over a four-day period and fill out a short evaluation for each one. More details at the Microsoft Small Business Summit website.

Update: As several people have noted, this offer is only available in the United States. Also, this “gift” will be reported as income on a W-9 form. According to the release, “Taxes, if any, are the sole responsibility of the recipient based on the fair market value of the software provided. The suggested retail value of the software is $669.00. Microsoft is required to collect W-9 information from each software recipient.”

A little interpretation of the above is in order. Just because Microsoft declares the “suggested retail value” as $669, that doesn’t mean that’s the value that has to go on your tax return. You’re required to pay taxes on the “fair market value,” which you can establish any way that makes sense. If you already own a copy of Office, for instance, the fair market value to you could reasonably be construed as the discounted price of the upgrade version of this software. I did a quick Froogle search and found this version available for as low as $190. If I were filing my taxes after receiving this software, I would include the W-9 plus a short letter and a printout of the first page of that search as documentation.

Of course, I’m only the son of an accountant, not an actual CPA or lawyer, so don’t take that as legal or financial advice!

I’ve gotten a colossal headache trying to make sense of Microsoft’s NDA policy for Office 12. (Or, as ‘Softies refer to it, Office “12” – the 12 is actually just a code name, you see, not a version number.)

Scoble posted (and I repeated) what appeared to be a definitive answer the other day, but now he’s backtracked:

It turns out that this isn’t quite the case. There are different NDAs given to different groups. Sorry for the confusion, but I need to be a little bit clearer about the Office 12 beta program. If you’re an MVP, in the Technical Beta or on the TAP program you’ll need to comply with the EULA of Beta1, which maintains confidentiality except in cases where the information is already public. If you’re a blogger and want to talk about Office 12 and you’re already on the beta, we recommend you learn what’s public and what’s not BEFORE you disclose anything new.

I’ve had this confirmed by three sources now, so I’m reasonably confident that this is the final answer.

Bottom line:

• If you are recognized by Microsoft as a member of the press, you can write or blog about the client applications in Office 12 Beta 1. This is true even if you are a member of the beta test program; however, any additional information you learn as a result of your participation in the beta program remains confidential.
• If you are a member of the beta test program and you are not recognized by Microsoft as a member of the press, then you continue to be bound by the restrictions in the end user license agreement (EULA).

This entire episode is a case study in how to communicate poorly. I really hope someone at Microsoft looks at what happened here and makes some changes.