Office 2007

Yep, that's right, the next version of Microsoft Office (known as Office 12 until now) will imaginatively be called Office 2007 when its released later this year! :)

I wonder how much their marketing department gets paid to come up with these names??? :)

The details of the different packages available can be found on the Microsoft website here , along with their pricing information .

I am looking forward to the new version, as I am still using Office 2000 at the moment. I would probably look to get the main 4 applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, which is the Standard package, but the $399 price tag seems a bit steep!

This is especially true if you compare it to the 'Home and Student' version which replaces Outlook with OneNote, but goes for just $149. You could buy this and Outlook for $258 - just over half the price of the standard package, and including the extra OneNote program!!

To be honest I don't know what OneNote is or what it does (time for some searching I think :) ) but this seems the way to go to me, especially as Paul Thurrott says that this version includes a licence to install it on up to three different machines !