Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member

As most of you well know the Office 2007 Beta 2 has been release to the public. Honestly it is so stable I'm running it for everyday use. This has of course allowed me to uncover a few “issues” if you will. Being the diligent tester that I am I wanted to submit these bugs, or at the very least find out if they had already been discovered. My search of MSDN and the Microsoft site itself for a way to do this unfortunately returned no results. Now, I know you can go to resources from within the program's setting dialog but that isn't really the place for this type of communication.

Out of frustration in not being able to find a place to let the product team know about the “issues” I posted an article over on the Channel9 forum found here. A kind user was nice enough to post a link to what Microsoft is calling the Smile program. Essentially it is a feedback application that runs in your taskbar that displays a smile and a frown. You can click which ever one applies, a smile for positive feedback and a frown for negative feedback. It will take a screenshot of your desktop and sends it along with the text you submit. It's not a bug report, which is really what I wanted to submit, but it will work just fine. I wanted to share in case others are having trouble finding where to submit issues that aren't part of the official beta team. Yes, it's a silly little program and I don't really like it sitting there running all the time but since I'm not part of the beta it's the only option I have.

The links in the Channel9 article point you to Jensen Harris's blog, a member of the Office UI team. There he describes the Smile program and welcomes the feedback. According to him it goes straight to the product team itself. Top notch.

If you haven't tried it out yet Office 2007 is an excellent suite. Head over to the Office 2007 beta 2 download site and grab it. You won't be sorry. I plan on posting a few of my favorite new features here in a little bit. I promise, I'm not going to say “The Ribbon Bar is awsome“ although I do like it. Enjoy.

posted on Friday, May 26, 2006 8:56 AM

Feedback

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 5/31/2006 10:25 AM Jane Jones

Outlook 2007 b2. Saving a draft freezes the app. You can get out of the freeze by changing window focus and switching back to Outlook. This works every time.

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 5/31/2006 10:28 AM Eric Hammersley

Interesting however I do not experience the same behavior. Unless there's more setup to it when I save a draft in Outlook B2 it works as expected. If there are more steps involved in order to reproduce I'd be interested to know.

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 5/31/2006 1:12 PM Jarrod Henderson

When using insert / picture into a e-mail, then resizing the picture typing becomes incredibly slow, it inserts about 1 character per second into the e-mail

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 6/1/2006 5:33 PM Richard Adams

Word.. Why can it not keep up, is it a caching thing. I am just a simple user but I have to constantly wait for the cursor to reappear, or to write what I have written. I have a 3.2 Ghz and 2GB ram so there should be no problem.
Can I have it save as word 3003 by default?
Outlook. when used with sql extremely slow. When read after so many seconds why does the folder not show as read. Have to move to another message for this to happen. Why does business contacts and personal contacts not overlap, especially as in personal it asks for a company name. If I am in business contacts and call by company name why does these people not show. I think they should be amalgamated as often business associates are also friends. makes it easier and would save double handling of details and to keep all correspondance in one place. This is also better for small to medium sized business in my opinion.

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 6/1/2006 5:38 PM Eric Hammersley

Yes it can save in compatibility mode by default. Click the Office icon and choose Word Options. This select the Save option from the left and change Save files in this format to Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc).

If you are a template use like I am it will automatically detect that it is a Word 2003 template and put your document into compability mode.

As far as the lag is concerned in both Word and Outlook I luckly have not experienced this. They both function almost flawlessly. I have been using them for everyday work at the office since release. That of course doesn't help you except to know that it is not a problem with Beta 2 as a whole. Possibly an add-in or some other conflict is slowing it down for you.

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 6/3/2006 12:06 AM cgillum

I'm surprised that you're having so much luck with Office 2007. So far, I love it, but I find it to be very unstable. Maybe it's because I'm running it on Vista Beta 2 - but I've honestly found it to be less stable than Vista itself. This includes Word and Outlook (PowerPoint has been pretty good, though).

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 6/3/2006 12:29 PM Eric Hammersley

I guess I'm just lucky. :) I ran Vista Beta 2 for about one day and removed it. I had so many problems with it there was no reason to even continue. It was the useability more than anything else. Network drives would lag for minutes at a time, etc.

Once I removed Vista I put trusty XP Pro back on but stuck with Office 2k7b2. Appearently I am a lucky one. If I didn't know better I would say it was a release candidate version more than a beta. It's just that stable for me. Not sure what makes me different.

Word has never crashed on me and I'm using it to write a book so it gets quite the workout. I can say however that I have done nothing with the new file format. All my work is done in compat mode.

As far as Outlook I think it crashed once, maybe twice but that's it. I've only tested with Exchange 2003 however and might experience more problems if I branched out in that area.

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 6/4/2006 5:02 AM Andy Kerr

Am also experiencing serious lag when opening documents, can I also check if anybody else has a problem with the scroll wheel in Word - it seems to work intermitently in Excel, but not at all in Word ?

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 6/7/2006 11:35 AM E. Baumgras 6-7-6

Since installing Office 2007 Beta 2 I have experienced an increase from 20 seconds, to 55 seconds to perform a system shutdown.

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 6/26/2006 11:50 PM Avi

I'd like the option to submit a simple bug report, thanks for the smiles anyhow :-)

I think I've correlated Outlook's freeze to switching between English and Hebrew text while writing a message.

And I can't find how to get to my contacts subfolders.

And how did they dare break the user interface without providing a compatability mode? I've used Word for about 15 years now, and I'm totally lost. Stupid!

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 6/27/2006 5:55 AM Eric Hammersley

I completely agree with you. I would like the ability to submit bug reports as well. I've submitted 6 or 7 different frowns with good solid descriptions, reproduction steps, and expected outcomes. I'm not sure anyone reads them. At least with a bug report I know they are seen.

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 7/9/2006 5:18 PM Scott Fletcher

When using archive folders and using rules to put mail lists directly into these the mails duplicate so there are two of everything.

This is very frustrating!!

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 7/28/2006 2:27 PM Treganna

In my case, setting up mail rules works fine for the first of 12 accounts I have- but I then get duplicates of EVERY message in each of my 12 accounts!

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 8/2/2006 3:21 PM Noel Latsha

Calendar requests not compatible with office 2k3?

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 8/10/2006 8:18 AM Sam

I paid $1.50 to try it out. Found out Outlook 2003 had to be deleted before I could intall the Outlook 2007 Beta. THEN I found that the new Outlook freezes up on me constantly. I have deleted the beta and gone back to my old Office 2003 and will think long and hard before upgrading to 2007.

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 8/25/2006 10:28 AM Bernie

I've been using Office 2007, IE beta, and Media Player beta and have had no problems EXCEPT the above mentioned typing lag in Outlook--when graphics are embedded. In fact, since downloading the betas I have had very slow graphic response in Photoshop CS2, and other software. Nothing else has changed. I've tried dumping start up and background programs, and other things mentioned in the various ideas I've found for everything BUT Windows XP--nothing specific for XP. But this slowness is the ONLY problem I've had with any of the betas so far. I have an older machine 1.8G P4 with 1G RDRAM so maybe there's a problem there. This is the year I buy the new computer but not until it comes with Vista installed and running properly!

# MS Word 2007 is a Downgrade!! 1/9/2007 2:25 PM Andrew

I cannot stand MS Word 2007 and hope that I can get a refund on it. I re-installing Office 2003 since there is an Undo option still in it.

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 4/15/2007 10:24 PM BJ

Office 2007 Enterprise is a big pile of junk.
User interface is completely different and unusable when compared to the older versions of Office. UGH! it makes me so mad, why change the interface so much that even expert users are lost trying to find basic functions?.
This POS is just not acceptable. A huge waste of money and loss in productivity.

Goodbye microsoft. I have finally had enough of your crap.

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 4/21/2007 2:00 PM Charles David

Office 2007 is not a pile of junk @ BJ, I'm using it now, and its very good. better than previous models. Many people are recommending Openoffice on this. But I will stick with it.

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 5/9/2007 5:06 AM Vaibhav

Well if you are stuck with the freezing problem, here's how i resolved it for my installation of Outlook 2007 with Windows XP: http://blog.gadodia.net/index.php/archives/outlook-2007-freezing-minimized/

Cheers.

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 6/29/2007 10:14 AM Jeanne

I bought Office 2007 upgrade in late May, and have had a horrible time with it. It was extremely unstable. Crashing frequently, and finally it became totally corrupt. It also wouldn't uninstall. I needed to MS tech support technicians to get it uninstalled (mostly), and get Office 2003 up and running again (mostly). I want a refund - but don't know if or how I will get it.

# Office 2007 MS-word/excel problems saving 1/2/2008 10:38 PM Vinny

MS Word 2007. I'm exasperated with both Excel and Word 2007, (Running on XP). Since most folks in my company are still on Office 2003, I use the compatibility mode. Don't know if this is the source, but I can frequently save a large document and then "boom" the hour glass and the program goes in to document recovery. Then I can't access unless I restart, (program says its in read only mode with options to save differently). Since this happens sometimes in Excel, I'm wondering if this is a program flaw. Any suggestions would be appreciate for this dangerous end-user! =/

Cheers - Vinny

# re: Submitting feedback for Office 2007 Beta 2 if you are NOT an official beta member 2/15/2008 5:22 PM Paul S

I agree with BJ. Its like someone promised you a remodeled house with new furniture, but delivered your old house, with all the furniture re-arranged and you stuff hidden in places you don't expect. I don't have problems with the system crashing, but I see absolutely no advantage to the "upgrade", and I'm sorry I did it...others in my workplace haven't, and things are working just fine for them.

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