SMB IT | Curtis Franklin » Living With Office 2007 Beta Part III

November 02, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Living With Office 2007 Beta Part III

TAGS: SMB Applications

And we're back again--gonna buckle down and get this freaking thing done. This time it's Access and OneNote.

ACCESS 2007
Last time I talked to Microsoft, I told them that as far as I was concerned, the best-redesigned app out of the whole Office 2007 suite was PowerPoint. Just love all that quick-preview/advanced graphics/ease of use stuff.

But when I asked them what they thought the most powerfully redesigned app out of this suite was, they said Access 2007--no question. Made me wish I used Access more so I might know what they were talking about. But I'm a resourceful guy, so I grabbed an employee of a customer whom I knew did a lot of Access work, and asked her what she thought.

According to her, the app is different right from the start. The ribbon is a big difference, but so is the initial startup screen that immediately drops the user on a icon-heavy short cut view towards common Access databases, a right-side history of recent work and a left-side connector to local or locally shared templates as well as Office Online.

Access 2007 Start View

Next, she fell hard for the Navigation Pane. This sucker is anchored to the left of the tabbed data view. Apparently, it replaces something that was called the Database Window in Access 2003. The Nav Pane organizes all the database objects and lets database architects create custom groups, assign names and add other database objects to the group. All in a nice tree format. It's easy enough that I may break down and learn to play with it myself.

She started messing with Embedded Macros, too. She says this is brand new to Access 2007 and should really enable amateur database developers to get some high-end performance out of their work. There's a bit of a learning curve, but she says that being able to do away with VBA code to do things like add shortcuts or buttons, is a real boon. (Cynic me, I'm wondering about security and reliability, but I guess only time will tell.)

She later emailed me some more impressions. Foremost is an upgrade to the Report Designer. As the rest of the Office 2007 suite has gotten a big boost to visual and layout tools, so has Access. The Report Layout View lets developers visually design a reporting front-end--placing controls, formatting text, all the good stuff. She likes it very much.

She did have a couple of downsides for folks looking to use older Access databases within the new 2007 interface, however. Both User Security and Replication are dead. You can still manage both of these if you stick with the old Access 2000-2003 formats, but if you go to the new Access 2007 format, you're out of luck. There are new tools to replace both in the updated file format, but backwards compatibility is shot.

OneNote 2007
This is one of the apps that didn't get a ribbon upgrade. In fact, OneNote didn't get too much of an upgrade in any sense--which has the upside that at least you won't be getting too many help desk calls on this one.

One new feature I really did like is the ability to import a presentation slide-by-slide--well, almost new. So when the PR guy whips out his presentation, you can ask for a copy off his thumb drive. Drop that onto your desktop and you can literally drag and drop it onto the OneNote notebook. Just check the 'print out' option when the drag-on dialog pops up:

This is doable in OneNote 2003, too, but the print-out always comes out in black and white. OneNote 2007 does the whole thing in color, so you can keep your presentation and your notes in one place like this:

Click here to view

Another new thing in OneNote 2007 is that Notebooks are much easier to manipulate as files. OneNote 2003 simply created a My Notebooks folder under My Documents and drops everything there in a semi-understandable hierarchy. OneNote 2007 lets you continue to store notebooks in this folder, but also lets you store individual Notebooks anywhere in the local file system, the network file system or on SharePoint file collab sites. Just right-click the notebook's tab and select Save As:

While this sounds great in practice, it can actually backfire. OneNote 2003 never required a save option. Close it and your notes are saved. But with the ability to save different notebooks in different places, there's a chance you can overwrite or modify notes you didn't intend to modify. That'll need a little training.

Aside from that OneNote is still a solid app. I was hoping for a more significant upgrade to the handwriting and tablet features, but I guess they've got leave something for Office 2009.

Posted by Oliver Rist on November 2, 2006 10:54 AM

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