Why "Upgrade" To Office 2007

walterbyrd writes "IMO: Office-2007 is a contender for the least useful upgrade in the history of computing. It's expensive, has a steep learning curve, and it's default format is even less compatible with anything else. Stan Beer discusses the "upgrade" in his article: Question: why do I need to upgrade to Office 2007?."

Comments

This story is dumb!

[N8F8]

we adults (or at least many of us) would prefer to keep using what we're familiar with until something better comes along

These arguments are EXACTLY the arguments used with every major innovation in the past.

DOS vs Windows anyone?

Re:This story is dumb!

[timftbf]

Most of the evolution/revolution has come in the form of layout. Yes, many authors want the ability to create very advanced documents that feature images, figures, tables, columns, rotated text, etc. You can't compare this to Word Perfect for DOS.

You're absolutely right. WP for DOS let you do all of those things, but let you keep control of them, and made it easy to produce coherent documents, with logical mark-up, in a user interface that didn't fight you every step of the way. (I was actually do most of my word-processing work in WP for VMS at the time, which was equally versatile.)

Word encourages you to apply effects willy-nilly, while at the same time making it really hard to apply styles properly, or see exactly what tags are applied to what elements, and in which order. (Does changing *this* change the definition of a style? Create a new style? Reformat this particular element in the style with custom local changes? Most of the time, it's anyone's guess.)

What you end up with is a document that can possibly be tweaked to look flashy, but probably unprofessional, by one person, on one PC / printer combination, for a given revision. Make changes, make changes on another machine, or (heaven forbid) let someone else make changes, and what you'll end up with is a document that quickly descends into a mess of semi-random style, formatting, language, spell-checking and other tags, with little to no hope of regaining any logical structure.

Re:Shooting themselves in the foot

[Kenshin]

Speak for yourself. I've been using Word for 15 years (on Mac and PC), and I personally think the ribbon interface is a nice change.

Yes, you initially have to take time to figure out where things are, but when you know it's quicker.

I might like to mention something else about all this bitching about "users having to learn a new interface" for Office 2007: Can I not use that same argument for not switching to Linux?

I'd argue the opposite

[Xest]

This seems the least thought through attempt at jumping on the anti-Microsoft bandwagon - Office 2007 is the first version in 12 years that really changes the way you use office to truly make you more productive. There are tools in Office 2007 to let you do some of the things that used to take you upwards of half an hour in under a minute.

It's sad that MS is slagged of for not changing Office much over the years, then why they finally do innovate, and change it to improve productivity and usefulness people slag it off with "Booohooo it has a steep learning curve". Honestly, Microsoft may do a lot of things wrong, but they do also do something right (i.e. the XBox 360, Visual Studio etc.), I honestly think Office 2007 is one of those things they've done right.

Speaking of menus...

[maillemaker]

I don't know what these new "ribbon" menus are or what they look like, but this just prompted me to speak of my biggest pet peeve of Windows menus that came on the scene a few years back: Dynamic menus. What I mean by this is how the drop-down menus off of the toolbar change to reflect the most recently-selected options. Thus every time you pull down a drop-down menu it looks different, and you must seek out the option you need, ususally by clicking on "more options" to see the "full" menu.

Whatever menus look like, they need to be consistent. Menus that change every time you look at them suck.

The reason to upgrade is simple and unavoidable

[goombah99]

Eventually more and more customers and clients will send you documents encoded in MS format. You will need to not only read them but edit them and send them back. So far no one has ever been able to create a document in MS WOrd that is 100% platform interchangable. Even MS word on mac is in 100% compatible with ms word on PC, though it's pretty close, the page layouts shift subtly with tables and figures changing positions and dimensions.

Thus the only way you can work with other people's word documents is to own word. anything else as the parent points out is a waste of valuable time. the cost of word is negligible compared to your time

Re:well... if you're gonna switch, why not

[maxume]

If you are paying people $40,000 a year, $500 a year in software licensing is a consideration, but it doesn't take much of a productivity gain to justify it. It also doesn't take a very large risk of lost productivity to justify not switching to something very new.

If switching does save $500, that money can obviously be used elsewhere, but OOo is going to have to be very good to convince people that are satisfied with MS Office to switch. I am not going to speculate about how many people are actually satisfied with office.

Re:well... if you're gonna switch, why not

[Toby_Tyke]

Well done for ignoring what the parent was saying, and replying to what you wished he had said instead. What he was saying was that switching is not a small decision, because there would be a large costs involved in retraining the IT staff who had to support the new Linux systems. I can tell you for a fact that out of the half dozen support staff I work with, at least four of them have never seen a PC running Linux, nevermind supported one.

In terms of applications needed by the business, we could pretty much switch 90 per cent of our staff tommorrow. The reason I would never suggest this is that it would not be cost effective. The whole IT infrastructure of the company is set up around supporting Windows. Switching over is not just case of burnig a few Ubuntu ISOs and showing some managers how to use Evolution. We would have to extensivly retrain our IT staff, find a hardware vendor who supported Linux (which might well be somewhat more expensive), and that's before we even begin to get into the day to day hassle of dealing with all the little problems it would throw up.

Case in point, I was setting up a laptop with a GPRS card on one of our salesmens laptop last week, and it wasn't working. After coming to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong at this end, I called the service providers support line. The friendly phone drone on the other end ran through a series of troubleshooting steps over the phone before coming to the same conclusion I had, and then discovering that the reason it wasn't working was because they had not turned the account on.

Now, suppose that was a linux laptop. For arguments sake, lets assume the card actually runs under Linux. Here is how the conversation might well have panned out:

Phone Drone: Click on the start menu...
Me: This machine is running Linux.
PD: Ah, right, I just need to put you hold for a second.
(Hold music)
PD: Sorry, we don't support Linux, you'll need to install this on a windows PC.

Yes, I expect that with much wrangling and arguing I could still make him go and check things their end, but we make calls like this every day. We would have to go through that every time. And no, we would not just be able to choose service providers who support Linux. In the example cited above, we have a choice of four networks for GPRs cards. To my knowledge, none of them support Linux.

There is no doubt that moving to OO.o would remove "an important part of the need to keep the Windows platform ". Unfortunatly, there are dozens more very good reasons why companies keep the Windows platform.