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.'"

Comments

Retraining

[Rik Sweeney]

Can you imagine what this would be like for a business with thousands of employees in each building who will need to be retrained to used Word. First there would be the cost of upgrading, them the cost of training, particularly if they need to bring in someone external and then they've lost man hours from all the retraining they've had to give.

Doesn't sound great to me.

Re:Been Using 2007 for about 2 weeks

[ditoa]

I have been using Office 2007 since Beta 2 and rolled the RTM out after a 2 weeks testing to just under 100 staff. Each week (in the past 4 that they have had it) we have asked for feedback. To begin with it was about 30% liking it and 70 hating it. A few people dropped out of the testing because they hated it so much and were replaced. Over those 4 weeks the feedback has changed and now the numbers are 90% liking it, 5-6% still not too sure and 4-5% still hating it. What this shows me is that it takes a while to adjust. Most people don't like change and Office 2007 is a big change. Give it some time and I am sure you will find it much nicer to use. Personally I really like it now however I started using it without reading all of the negative comments and so I took a very relaxed approach to its new UI. It took me about 2-3 weeks of daily use but now I wouldn't want to go back.