Microsoft Office 12: Possibly Better, Possibly Worse

My take on the new Microsoft Office? They've made steady improvements to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – although I don't believe folks are going to rush out and upgrade as soon as possible (especially with an unrealistic price point). There are plenty of free Office-like application alternatives out there, including OpenOffice and ThinkFree Office Online. You can get away with using any one of them to create, edit, or view these basic formats. How often do you use your word processor, spreadsheet, or presentation programs? 90% of the time, you use 10% of their features. The only Microsoft Office app that I use constantly and consistently is Outlook, for the very reason that there's no other usable PIM on the Windows platform. I was hoping that the next version of Outlook would win me over from Outlook 2000, but I fear my hopes were dashed. I really don't like the new Ribbon-driven interface, and there's no falling back to “classic mode” (according to them). I'll reserve final judgement for the final Office code release, naturally. The Outlook team could only win me over by improving the client's non-Exchange performance, UI snappiness, and general layout esthetics. I'm not holding my breath.