Upgrading Word/Excel

[ki11erDM]

For those of you that like 2007 I am going to start to roll this out in the next few weeks for my users.
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/searchcommands/Pages/default.aspx

Should help with some of the other basic questions users have.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I've been using Word & Excel 2007 for about a year and a half now, and I hate the UI. Almost everything requires 2-3 clicks more to find.

The ribbon idea is nice in principle, but in practice I find far inferior to the old menu system where I could quickly scan down a list of words and find the thing I wanted.

The only thing I like about it is the docx format. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they had some very specific need which could only be met by it.

Word 2003 was much better in most ways as far as I'm concerned.

 

[drothgery]

I've been using Word & Excel 2007 for about a year and a half now, and I hate the UI. Almost everything requires 2-3 clicks more to find.

The ribbon idea is nice in principle, but in practice I find far inferior to the old menu system where I could quickly scan down a list of words and find the thing I wanted.

The thing is that lots of people could not. The overwhelming majority of new feature requests MS got in the decade prior to the Office 2007 were for features that Office already had.

 

[Marius Delphus]

Another vote for "Office 2007 destroys my workflow." Worse, I'm in an environment where I have to maintain compatibility with Office 2000 (and sometimes Office 97), so the new XML/ZIP document formats aren't something I can take advantage of in any way.

My Word workflow depends heavily on VB macros and a custom paragraph style template, which I struggled to implement in Word 2007. I couldn't get the macros to work for the life of me, and Word 2007 wouldn't always obey my template.

PowerPoint 2007 was worse: what it does to slide templates (in particular, when you have to bounce back and forth between PowerPoint 2003 and 2007) is unforgivable.

I never did figure out the workarounds or what I was doing wrong: a hard drive failure led me to reformat and reinstall Windows XP and Office 2003. I'm a much calmer person now.

 

[Master of the Game]

Thanks for all the advice. I think I'm going to give Open Office a try and see if I like it before spending the $120. I really only need Word and Excel, so any of the bundles with more features would be wasted on me.

 

[Plane Sailing]

The thing is that lots of people could not. The overwhelming majority of new feature requests MS got in the decade prior to the Office 2007 were for features that Office already had.

Funnily enough, they said that prior to the release of Office 2003 as well

My issue is that in attempting to make funny little dodads more visible to people they made some pretty standard stuff much more awkward to find and use now. Quick, convert text to table! Quick, change the sentence capitalisation! Stuff that you can't find by looking at it, you've got to mouse over all kinds of icons until you happen to hit the right one.

Bah.

 

[Aus_Snow]

I still use Office 2003, generally - Word, most of all. I haven't seen or heard of any good reason to move forward (or backward) with that particular suite.

But then, as is the case with other EN World members, apparently, Windows XP looks to me in much the same boat, when compared with say, Vista or 98 (or. . . ME.) Oh, or 2000. I knew I forgot one of them.

Open Office is pretty good, too. If I didn't own Office '03, I'd think about using that instead.

 

[LightPhoenix]

Another vote for "Office 2007 destroys my workflow." Worse, I'm in an environment where I have to maintain compatibility with Office 2000 (and sometimes Office 97), so the new XML/ZIP document formats aren't something I can take advantage of in any way.

Thanks for all the advice. I think I'm going to give Open Office a try and see if I like it before spending the $120. I really only need Word and Excel, so any of the bundles with more features would be wasted on me.

If you're basically using word processing for personal use, or will be printing things out from the same computer you're using (ie, schoolwork, perhaps), I recommend giving OpenOffice Writer a try. I've found that OO tends to do formatting a little better than Office 2003, though I can't speak to later versions. However, if you're using it in an environment where you'll be sharing files, or accessing OO files from Office a lot, I recommend 2003 over OO. I've had a lot of problems with compatibility, where something will look how I want it in OO, but when I load it in Office the formatting is odd.

As far as Excel goes, it is a VASTLY superior product to OO Calc, no question. About the only thing OO Calc is good for is making tables easily. It's nigh worthless for graphing in all but the most rudimentary of situations. It also suffers from formatting problems when used in Excel. I can't recommend it at all. I have to say the same thing for Powerpoint over OO Impress.

I know it's fashionable to hate on MS, and I do wish that the open source versions were as good, or better. However, MS does have a good thing with Excel and Powerpoint. Great? Maybe not, there's definitely room for improvement. It's miles above OO though.

 

[Marius Delphus]

The environment I was speaking of is the office environment where I work. We are standardized on Microsoft Office, but in general we have our choice of whether to use Office 97, 2000, XP, 2003, or 2007. Thus the need for backward compatibility. Most of my co-workers choose 2000 or 2003; very few have chosen 2007 (and those that have are quickly informed of the need to save in backward-compatible file formats... though I do have the Office 2007 Compatibility Kit installed just in case).

I apologize if I implied otherwise.

 

[LightPhoenix]

The environment I was speaking of is the office environment where I work. We are standardized on Microsoft Office, but in general we have our choice of whether to use Office 97, 2000, XP, 2003, or 2007. Thus the need for backward compatibility.

I would definitely recommend sticking with MS Office then. Like I said, I've had a lot of formatting problems when I've had to send files made in OpenOffice to people with MS Office. A conspiracy theorist might think MS does it on purpose, but I just think the formatting in MSO sucks bad.