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Yesterday at work IT installed Office 2007 on my Dell laptop. In the words of Gordon Ramsey, I’m ‘fucking gobsmacked’ at how brilliant it is. Yes, how brilliant it is.

I hate to make this comparison first thing out of the gates, but when I first looked at a Mac I couldn’t get over how bright and vibrant their displays were. Every colour resonated and every line of text was so sharp. I thought this was all due to the quality of display. While that may have something to do with it, it’s not everything.

Have you ever noticed that when working in PowerPoint that any line or word is always jagged and rigid? Well in Office 2007, that’s not the case. Which leads me to believe that running the old PowerPoint was like plugging in an Atari to an HDTV.

What’s more is the functionality of Office. They’ve changed the entire interface. So much so that you won’t be able to find what it is you’re looking for as quickly as you were before. Once you get your bearings though you’ll find it much easier.

They’ve improved on even simple things, like using the scroll wheel to navigate through the different options listed in the tool bar. The templates are that much better as well, especially for PowerPoint. Excel and Word have different looks as well all mirroring the master template.

All the little annoyances are fixed as well. I used to use a black template in PowerPoint and in the old version when I would click on the text box to type in white text, I couldn’t see what I was typing. Now the text boxes and images are much easier to maneuver and manipulate to whatever way you want.

All around it’s an absolute leap in the right direction for Microsoft. I’m thoroughly impressed.