Filed under: Windows, Office, Microsoft, Commercial
Test drive Office 2007 without the download
by Jordan Running Jun 27th 2006 at 5:35PM
Want to give Office 2007 Beta a try but don't want to bother downloading it? You're in luck, because Microsoft is doing a Test Drive program which lets you try the product in your web browser. Well, their web browser-unsurprisingly it's IE-only and requires you install a plugin and sign in with Passport. If the server is busy (and it is right now) you'll be put in a queue, but my estimated wait of 35 minutes turned out to be 5. The real wait was for the thing to load, but after about 10 minutes and few hiccups, it did. Once it's loaded you can play around with live, working copies of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, OneNote, Project, Publisher, Visio, InfoPath and SharePoint. Microsoft provides a tutorial for each, which is nice for getting acquainted, but if you just want to poke around you can kill the tutorial easily. There's a lot to see, and if you've been on the fence about Office 2007, this test drive will probably tip you one way or the other.
[Via Netscape]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Claudiu Spulber said 3:20AM on 6-28-2006
http://why.openoffice.org/
"Microsoft offers you a "test drive" so that you can see what Microsoft Office 2007 might look like when it finally goes on sale.
The OpenOffice.org Community invites you to go one better - download a fully-functional, legal copy of the OpenOffice.org 2 office suite today for a test drive. If you like it, use it free for as long as you like. We say it's the ultimate no-strings-attached test drive - if you enjoy the test drive, keep the car!"
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Stuart said 6:01AM on 6-28-2006
Emm Why use Microsoft Office as opposed to OpenOffice...because its useable...becaues it works...because its powerful...because it seemlessly gets on with everything else your doing, not to mention the compatibility, the fact it looks nice and ergonomic, oh and just one more thing - You can use it and you don't need to spend hours upon hours learning some pish that crashes all the time. Simple really :)
(As you can tell i used OpenOffice for about a month and it drove me up the wall. Tried to recreate some sort of desktop?? )
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Victor Pimentel said 10:18PM on 6-29-2006
Stuart: "[...] mention the [Office] compatibility"
The Office 2007 compability is a pain. Word saves docs in .docx files, PowerPoint saves pps in .ppsx files, etc...
Of course, .docx and similar are incompatible with Office 2003 or older. And the import to a .doc or to a .ppt is absurd (10 times bigger than the "normal" .pptx). So don't "mention the Office compability", please.
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