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Office 2007 — Better But a Tough Switch
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Office 2007, coming out Jan. 30, is a 'radical revision,' writes the Wall Street Journal's Walter S. Mossberg. 'The entire user interface, the way you do things in these familiar old programs, has been thrown out and replaced with something new. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint, all of the menus are gone — every one. None of the familiar toolbars have survived, either. In their place is a wide, tabbed band of icons at the top of the screen called the Ribbon. And there is no option to go back to the classic interface.' He adds, 'It has taken a good product and made it better and fresher. But there is a big downside to this gutsy redesign: It requires a steep learning curve that many people might rather avoid.'"
I wonder if this will break all the Excel macros I've written too.
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The entire user interface, the way you do things in these familiar old programs, has been thrown out and replaced with something new.
I'm crossing my fingers in the hope that they replaced the entire user interface with a giant version of Clippy.
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For people who mostly control Office via keyboard commands, and rarely use menus and toolbars, all of the basic keyboard commands are the same.
Phew!
The menus, icons, and buttons are helpful, but keyboard commands are where Microsoft really shines. X (or rather, the Window Managers) still has a long way to go in that area. I'd actually think if MS changes the keyboard shortcuts it would be a real issue, but for the icons, people will learn them easily enough and move on.
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Hear hear! This is exactly why I never upgraded to Windows in the first place. Real professionals use DOS.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
A few weeks ago, I watched someone install this program by mistake onto a new computer. It's what the university is now pushing, so they kept it.
It would be hard to describe their frustration, so I won't bother. It took them half an hour to find "save as". As usual, the OS itself hid the extension so you could not tell that it was saving everything in .DOCX, the 6000 page "open XML" successor to the previous M$ "open" format, RTF. I can only imagine the anger and sadness that awaits true Word users who have been using all the painful tools that M$ bloated into the program, drawing tools, flight simulator, whatever.
The upgrade train is roaring on and M$ is really pushing hard this time. It's going to piss a lot of people off and offers great opportunity for free software. You can now say that it's easier to make the move to Open Office for a new system than it is to move to Office 2007.
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LOAD "SIG",8,1
Share this I must -- Madeline
She better be careful with sharing that ribbon, the BSA might be hiding behind that one tree.
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