Boring screenshots for Office 2007 ? Now Microsoft has a video showing off the new Office 2007 in action.

I think this is a clever marketing tool from Microsoft as it actually gives one a better understanding and people generally like to see things.

The video covers several Office products including Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The ribbon interface is the main departure from the menu and toolbar interface in Office 2003.

Microsoft wants to give the average user the power to design incredible looking documents with Office 2007 and I think they might be able to achieve that with this slick, modern and more intuitive interface. Just make sure your PC has enough juice for the Aero interface.

New Office 2007 Video Show in Action site

Come on. Now Windows Vista wants to grow up just like Linux or Mac OS X. Give me a break. The Windows Vista User Account Protection is the most unoriginal thing I’ve heard ever since I’ve gone the Unix/Linux path. Check out how User Account Protection is gonna make users around the world wish they had Windows 98 or Linux workstations for their work. Thanks Bruce Schneier !

Here’s the good news. In Windows Vista, Microsoft is indeed moving to this kind of security model. The feature is called User Account Protection (UAP) and, as you might expect, it prevents even administrative users from performing potentially dangerous tasks without first providing security credentials, thus ensuring that the user understands what they’re doing before making a critical mistake. It sounds like a good system. But this is Microsoft, we’re talking about here. They completely botched UAP.

Looks like Microsoft came out with a good new reason for you to purchase the original Windows license. You ain’t gonna get em lovely dovey fancy graphics on your Windows Vista Office if you still have pirated versions installed. Same goes for the basic Windows Vista OS.

Just in case you do want fancy graphics, you should also read the Hardware Requirements for Windows Vista.

With the new operating system, Microsoft is offering plenty of new graphics tricks, including translucent windows, animated flips between open programs and “live icons” that show a graphical representation of the file in question. But before Vista will display its showiest side, known as Aero, it will run a check to make sure the software was properly purchased.

No Fancy Graphics on Pirated Windows Vista source

Why on earth would anyone want to run Vista Office with only 128 MBs of RAM ? George Ou at ZDnet says that Web-based word processors like ThinkFree Office makes computers slow down as it hogs memory resources like a worm. Well, I think web based softwares using Ajax is something that will stay for awhile as most companies are trying hard to make sure staff don’t simply install illegal software on their PCs.

The moral of the story : Get more RAM. Its cheaper than gold now and 1GB seems so passe.

Google’s newly acquired Writely should hardly be considered a replacement for Microsoft Office, Word Perfect, OpenOffice.org Write, or any other rich client. The only Web-based word processor or Office Suite that comes close to something like Microsoft Office is ThinkFree Office which is written in Java. But ThinkFree Office makes resource-hogging OpenOffice.org look good by comparison. Just the word processor alone with no data loaded eats up 100 MBs of RAM. Loading up the spread sheet and presentation software will cost you another 200 MBs of RAM. Oh and if you actually want some data with that, you better prepare a Gigabyte of RAM. Vista on the other hand will run on a computer with 128 MBs of RAM (without any Aero Glass eye candy).

Truth is: Web Office takes more resources than Vista source