So Ive been using Office 2007 Beta 2 for the past few months now. I always love getting to the Beta 2 stage with new Office versions as they are always looking really slick and are nice and performant. Ive got 2007 installed on 2 machines here, as well as 2003 on 2 others. Despite a healthy bunch of initial sceptism about the new Ribbon UI I have found it to live up to the promise of being a lot more productive and allowing you to find all those hidden features in the products making those switches back to 2003 harder and harder :)
So the one exception to the rule in this version on "performant" is PowerPoint. While not being entirely consistant it has large issues in the way its which it seems to be rendering out all the items in the slide deck onto the screen and into the thumbnail views spiking the CPU for long periods. In fact, the lack of consistancy means that often this runs "fine enough" while lately like today its been a bit too slow for comfort. This has been of particular issue lately because of the amount of time I have needed to spend in PowerPoint in preperation for TechEd.
So based off a vague memory about someone mentioning to me that you could side by side 2003 and 2007 I decided to test out the theory. Uninstalled PowerPoint from 2007, and then installed just PowerPoint from 2003. And... it just works! :)
The new and the old - happy friends! :)
One of those things which is "good to know" in case you end up with similar thoughts :)
Right - back to the PowerPointing then ;)