Office 2007...

So the next version of Office is coming out in January.

Initially, I'll admit, I took the skeptic's view. There's a lot of good stuff out there, but I'm doing fine with what I've got.

Then, I started to play around with it.

• What you can do with Excel in terms of quickly making sense out of large quantities of numbers using Conditional Formatting is just amazing!!
• PowerPoint--I've seen so many presentations butchered by bad graphics. The Smart Art feature is just a wicked simple way to make a good impression without wasting time.
• Word-good ol' Word. Not only can you post directly to a Blog (nice, eh), but the fact that you can see the font changes as they occur so you don't have to keep going back and picking one is just fantastic.

I'm loving the ribbon. Even though I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts, I'm discovering new ways of doing things and doing old things faster.

I've really come around on this product and am VERY excited about what it's doing for my personal productivity.

And I didn't even talk about Outlook...

I was concerned that people would feel Office is a commodity and choose something like Open Office or Star Office. I've used both those products as well and I've got to say...from a usability perspective alone, Microsoft has raised the game significantly with this release. Very, very cool.