Today marks the end of week 1 of using Windows Vista as my operating system on my laptop.  I’ve encountered no major issues yet, though I still haven’t done much with it.  No games are currently installed other than solitaire and the other typical suspects that come with windows.  Vista adds a few to the mix but I haven’t spent any real time with them yet.  I’m still finding little “small touches” that I didn’t notice right away.  I don’t know what to call some of them but I will say they add some nice polish to the OS.  One example of such is shown below: 

In an explorer window, there is now a small black arrow next to each folder in hiearchy.  If you click the arrow you get a drop down of all the folders at that level.  To many, this is probably a small simple feature, hardly worth mentioning.  But I think this is one of many “small things” that makes the polished interface in Vista not only more enjoyable to use, but also more productive.

Office 2007

    The short summary is that I love the new ribbon interface.  A lot of people I’ve talked to sounded reluctant to make such a change, but really it has taken me no time for me to pick it up.  It really is intuitive to me.  The realtime previews work great.  I’m not using the new xml-based file formats because I tend to exchange files with other people at work who are all on previous versions of office, on both Windows and Macintosh platforms.

That being said, I’m not a secretary.  I spend very little time producing documents in word or excel, and more time viewing or tweaking documents produced by others.  So I’m sure there are plenty of nuances I may never discover about the new office suite.  As far as Office goes, I use Outlook more than any of the other apps.  I’m sure I’m not alone in this category.  So I will focus on Outlook, as that is the app I’ve used the most thus far.

The biggest change in Outlook I noticed is the calendar.  And it looks great.  Gone are the ugly old square yellow boxes from previous versions.  You can view multiple calendars and even overlay them ontop of one another, with each having its own pretty alpha-blended color.  You can subscribe to and publish Internet calendars in the popular .ics format.  Appointments can be categorized by color, making it very appealing to the eye, as well allowing a quick “at-a-glance” summary of your schedule.  Sure, many of these features are hardly original (*cough* – iCal – *cough*, but imitation really is the sincerest form of flatery.  And Outlook 2007′s calendar does a great job implementing these ideas.

Outlook also has full integration with Vista’s desktop search.  Finding messages is near-instant.  I use this feature constantly.  I like how I can instantly preview office documents attached to a message, though I wonder if this dangerous for security.  The folks at microsoft surely thought of that, as by default it displays a short warning and you have to click “preview” to force it to show the file.  This same preview functionailty is available in Vista’s explorer windows.

There are surely dozens upon dozens of new features in both the new Vista operating system and office 2007 suite that I’ve not mentioned.  These are just a few that stand out to me as things I find immediately useful in my everyday work environment.