I have been waiting for Microsoft to release the Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh because it has already been a few months since the last release of Beta 2. I have also seen a lot of really cool features, such as the auto-hiding ribbon, that is supposed to be in the upcoming release.
Bink.nu is saying that the Technical Refresh should be released on September 14 or 15, which is just one week after Vista RC1 is scheduled. That schedule would make sense because they would want people to test Vista RC1 and Office 2007 as much as they can before both products are released to businesses later this year.
Vista.ru has a nice screenshot gallery of a post-Beta 2 version of Office 2007 which has a new look to it. This may be similar to the Technical Refresh build but there has been no information provided by Microsoft as to what build number the TR will be.
Another blog has extracted the Office 2007 icons from build 4228 and posted them to their site. You can now see what all of the icons will look like for the different file types and the multiple programs. I think that all of the icons seem a little Mac-like, don’t they?
Do you see enough of additional/new features to warrant upgrading from the current version?
I have had problems creating certain types of graphs in Excel so I am sure those kind of bugs will be fixed. Also, if I try to save some of my spreadsheets in the new XML format they get screwed up and corrupted.
Most of the changes are going to be under-the-hood and you won’t be able to visually see them, but the update will definitely be worth it.