Ok, hands up who has tried the new Office 2007 Beta?

I for one have stayed well away from it for a very good reason. I have been bitten by beta software before, so badly in fact that it is one of the reasons for my recent(ish) reinstall.

I have been bombarded by stuff about it and I had just been itching to try it out.

Well, for once MS came to the rescues with a very neat idea.

http://www.runaware.com/microsoft/en-us/office2007/td

It’s an online test environment. Now don’t be sceptical like I was. I though this was going to be some poor webpage with JavaScript all over the place to give the appearance of Office.

Oh how wrong I was. It seem this is actually a virtual copy running on a real machine. There are test files, you can save data, you can use the whole of all the applications fully at a half decent speed.

In fact, I actually managed to prove quite how real it was when I managed to Crash Excel:

Just to prove quite how good it was, it then just had to do what I last expected:

And then the final icing on the cake….I logged off the machine. I then tried to go back in and I got this:

Don’t think for one second I’m going to review it though. It was cool, lots of fun, but I didn’t have a long enough lunch break to decided it it was really worth me getting.