Here is the knowledgebase article courtesy of M$ themselves. There have been rumours that they would be releasing another version soon which would stop your Windows from working if you are using an illegal copy, although I highly doubt that would happen.

This free public beta has been out for quite sometime now, but I just got my hands on installing and trying it out yesterday. ;)

A pretty radical interface has been introduced to replace the standard menus/buttons/toolbars that have been ubiquitous in all previous generations of M$ Office. Initially I found the toolbar buttons layout to be a little confusing, but after a while, you do notice that the developers have carefully placed the mostly used features right in the main interface allowing you quick access unlike previously where browsing through multiple stages of menus were necessary to get some simple things done.

I’ll probably need more time to give a more solid assessment of it, but I don’t seem to dislike it so far. Will post up updates on it as I use it more often or if I find anything worthy of mentioning.

I’ve been told by some friends that Outlook 2007 Beta is very buggy, so you might want to stay away from it if you have been relying on Outlook 2003 or previous versions as your main email client (I use Gmail’s web interface for email, so I currently don’t use any standalone email client ;)).

Here’s a screenshot of M$ Word 2007 Beta:

You can download and install Office 2007 Beta here, or if you would like to just try it out without having to go through the hassle of downloading and installing, you can try it here. More screenshots can be found here.