Over 500,000 copies of the Office 2007 Beta 2 were downloaded in the first two days of its release, Joe Friend, lead programme manager on the Microsoft Word design team, has reported on a company blog. 

Microsoft released the Office 2007 Beta 2 code at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference last week, together with betas for Windows Longhorn Server and Windows Vista.

Longhorn Server and Vista are currently available for download for subscribers to Microsoft's MSDN and TechNet programmes and will be released to the general public within weeks.

Early testers did not report any major issues with installing and running the Office beta, but some found the new user interface a surprisingly radical change.

"I'm not so sure that I'm thrilled with the new 'ribbon' interface. It's all bubbly and shiny, but it eats up a lot of my screen space," designer Kevin Airgid wrote on his blog. 

Airgid asked Microsoft to devise a way to revert the user interface to its old, more familiar form, but the software giant has indicated that it will not supply such an option.
Blogger Ollie Bradley, a 16-year-old student, also had some trouble adjusting to the new user interface. 

"The user interface really does take a while to get used to, but I definitely feel smarter and more motivated to work in an environment like this (as corny as it sounds)," he wrote.

Bradley was impressed with the new blogging feature in Microsoft Word which allows authors to post their entries directly to their blogs with a single click.