The highly-anticipated release of Microsoft Office 2007 beta 2 was finally released this week. Our editor's got their hands on the latest free download from Microsoft.com and took a look at the second beta of Microsoft Office 2007, which is scheduled for a full, retail release in January 2007 along with the release of Windows Vista.

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Microsoft Office 2007 beta 2 looks very much like the Office 2007 beta 1 "technical refresh" that was released a few months ago. The Office 2007 interface has remained the same and is still drastically different than Office 2003 and other previous Microsoft Office versions. The first thing that you'll notice when you open an Office 2007 product is the completely revamped interface. The traditional drop-down menu's at the top have been replaced by what is called a "ribbon." It's basically tabs that change depending upon which tab is chosen. For example, the "home" tab contains all of your formatting options, such as font settings, page layouts, and colors. Other tabs include Insert, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review, and View. Each tab is very neatly organized and well though out. It didn't take long for us to master the use of the ribbon and we quickly fell in love with it. In addition to the ribbon menu, the main menu of all the Office 2007 programs is now accessible by pressing the Office logo in the upper-left corner. It then will display a much more expanded main menu that includes a feature selection on the left and then when you hover over one of those features, more options appear on the right side.

Microsoft Office 2007's new "ribbon" menu organizes all of the suite's features into one easy to use tabbed menu system.

The new expanded main menu in Office 2007 programs is accessible via the Office logo in the upper-left corner.

The ribbon also expands to your needs depending upon what you are doing in Word at the time. For example, if you are dealing with pictures or clip art, a new "picture formatting" tab appears with options specifically for editing and manipulating graphics.You can now also edit an image right in Word 2007 without having to open an external image editor.

There is also a new "blogging" system integrated into Word 2007. It works with Blogger and with Microsoft's own blogging services. You use the File/New menu to open a new blog entry, input your blog service's username and password, and then create a new entry or download existing ones to edit. There is also new options to protect your work by password-protecting and encrypting it. Word 2007 used a new XML-based document format (called ".docx") as its default file format and it dramatically shrinks file sizes and allows developers to develop tweaks and changes to the file format to suit their needs. We were, however, unable to open .docx files in previous Office versions. Luckily, you can still save documents created in Office 2007 in the traditional .doc file-format that can be opened in previous Office versions.

Word 2007 makes it very easy to make blog posts to many popular online blogging services.

There is also a new Office Diagnostic feature that allows you to run it and it will attempt to detect problems with your Office 2007 installation and try to fix them. It seems like a pretty nice idea, but we were not able to test it to see if it would work.

The new Office Diagnostics will attempt to find and fix problems with your Office 2007 installation if you find that you're having problems.

Microsoft PowerPoint has also been really revamped behind-the-scenes. The new PowerPoint 2007 is filled with new slide templates, image-editing tools, and slide animations. The new ribbon menu is of course also present in the new PowerPoint 2007. In an effort to please frequent images users, Microsoft is including a ton of preprogrammed style galleries to spice up images and text. New "SmartArt" capabilities allow you to transform boring bulleted text into a chart or other useful informational graphic.

PowerPoint 2007 is filled with new templates that will add some real spice to any presentation.

PowerPoint 2007 files are also XML-based (".pptx") files, which means they are smaller and more easily recovered and saved if they somehow become corrupt or unreadable. Other small improvements make PowerPoint 2007 well worth it if you frequently create PowerPoint presentations.

Other programs that come with the Office 2007 suite include Excel, InfoPath, Outlook, Access, and Publisher. All of them include the new XML-based file formats and the new visual look and layout that the above Office 2007 programs have. To run Office 2007, you must have Windows XP SP2 on a 500MHz or high CPU with 2GB free on your hard drive and at least 256MB of RAM (512MB for Outlook with Business Contact Manager). In our tests, all Office 2007 beta 2 programs have been very stable and functional. However, remember that this is a beta release, so install at your own caution or on a computer other than your primary computer. If you would like to download Office 2007 Beta 2 for yourself, you can sign up for the free beta at Microsoft's Office 2007 Web site.