Technology, Computer, Internet, and Security Blog

Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and founder sharing his thought about how he use latest office suite, Microsoft Office 2007.

People are often curious about which applications and technology I use, and if there are features in the new version of Office that have changed the way I work. Without a doubt, the 2007 Microsoft Office system enables me to get my work done more easily and quickly than before.

If you visit my office, you will probably notice right away that I have three large flat screen displays that sit together and are synchronized so they work like a single very wide display. The large display area enables me to work very efficiently. I keep my Outlook 2007 Inbox open on the screen to the left so I can see new messages as they come in. I usually have the message or document that I’m currently reading or writing in the center screen. The screen on the right is where I have room to open up a browser or look at a document that someone has sent me in e-mail.

I spend the majority of my time communicating with colleagues, customers, and partners. As a result, Outlook is the application that I use the most. I receive about 100 e-mail messages per day from Microsoft employees, and many more from customers and partners.

It’s very important that I hear what people think about our products and our company. Yet I need to balance that against the very real risk of information overload from all the e-mail that I receive. The advances we made in Outlook 2007 for filtering, rules, and search folders have made it much easier to manage my e-mail than before, especially because so much happens automatically once I’ve set everything up.

A great thing is that all my voice mail, faxes, and even instant messages are sent to my Outlook Inbox using our unified communications technology. Another important feature of unified communications that we have integrated into Office applications is presence and identity. That means I can always tell at a glance whether the person I need to get in touch with is available or not.

One change to Outlook that I appreciate is tasks are now integrated with how I view my calendar. Before the 2007 Office release, I never used the Outlook task feature, but now that tasks are automatically added to my calendar, it makes it much easier to stay on top of the important things I need to do.

Source: Office Hours

As for me generally I really love this latest Microsoft Office 2007, how they try to make each of their software can communicate with each other. Such as, you can send you email from Outlook 2007 to OneNote 2007, ability to synchronize task between Outlook and OneNote and also ability to blog from OneNote.

My only problem and the only one is this latest 2007 suite not memory friendly. I know to put also those nice feature need a lot of resource, but I think the cause is the .NET framework. As you can see, all latest Microsoft products was written in .NET and .NET is not resource friendly not to mention slower performance compared to native language based applications.

Currently my PC setup is P4 1.6GHz and 1GB RAM, launching multiple office applications is a nightmare. Maybe all Microsoft’s engineer got high-end machine so they didn’t notice this drawback, but IMHO they should think not all people have the latest hardware setup to fulfill Office Suite recommendation.