More on using Office 12 and IE 7

Well, after almost an entire day in my office working with the new Microsoft software, I can report some successes and some problems.

Obviously, the blog posting from Word works (obvious because you’re reading these posts), though I haven’t yet gotten Word to recognize my categories, and it doesn’t seem to know about tagging posts.

The Outline function in Word seems much improved from previous versions, which is making it easy to work on the outline for my ECAR research bulletin.

On the other hand, IE 7 crashes every time I try to open a PDF file link, which has made it much more difficult to work on my ECAR research bulletin (grumble grumble…that’s what you get for trying new beta software on a project that matters that you’re already behind the deadline on).

I managed to successfully import my bookmarks from Firefox into IE (once I actually located where the Firefox bookmarks were). IE, however, seems to have put them in a different order than they were in Firefox – that’s confusing. I wish I could use Foxmarks with IE – seems like it’d be possible for somebody to write that as an extension. IE 7 also doesn’t seem to have the equivalent of the Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox – it has a sidebar that you can open your favorites in. Since I don’t want to keep a sidebar open all the time, that just means my heavily used bookmarks are one more click away.

When I imported my bookmarks from Firefox it added them to the already existing IE favorites, most of which were years out of date. I couldn’t figure out how to efficiently edit and manage the favorites from within IE – it would only let me delete one bookmark at a time, for instance. Once I opened up the Favorites folder, however, I could manage the bookmarks and folders just like any other Windows folder.

Interesting note about blogging from Word – so I publish the post to the blog server. Then should I save the document in Word? What good would that do? Will Word know if I try to republish an document with edits, like Ecto does? Seems unlikely, but I’ll try it out at some point.