Slashdot Mirror
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?."
The problems mentioned mostly exist for existing 'power' users who already know Office 2K3 and are unfamiliar with the new 'ribbon' interface of Office 2007. I think that the vast majority of users out there in the real world, however, use Microsoft Office as a fancy word processor and don't really know the true functionality of Word or Excel or PowerPoint.
For those users, the ribbon may be a great help in unlocking the use of the tool.
Of course, the real question is will the PHBs in major corporations see it that way? If they don't adopt Office 2007 in droves, it will die. If they do, then due to file format differences, everyone will be forced to upgrade and this becomes an entirely moot point. *sigh* Which is too bad for those of are using OpenOffice.org and other competing open source products.
My blog
As an employer, you'll want to upgrade because that's what all the college students will be trained in.
I'm still irritated that the college I work at jumps on every little thing from Microsoft, but still doesn't cover anything recent from the UNIX or Mac worlds.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I've been a diehard Microsoft Office user for years and have recently installed Outlook 2007 (upgrading from 2003) and discovered that they've replaced everything with a new font system which, on my dual high resolution LCD's, looks awful and blurred. To most people it's an improvement, however one of the original co-creators of Cleartype has gone on record to say that many humans have the ability to perceive more colors and these humans may find Cleartype to seem blurred or less clear. Going back to a non-Cleartype setup is extremely difficult, involving changes made in four separate areas of Outlook's unintuitive option screens.
What about a serious investigation of whether or not the new features will help his organization?
How about a review of their current users, features used/wanted, to find out whether an upgrade would be cost effective and return something for the investment?
Why does every new MS Office release inspire a new round of articles from dopes wanting someone else to tell them what would be good for their business, without much effort on their own behalf?
Anytime I hear or read someone asking whether they should upgrade to the latest version of ANYTHING, I just want to choke them.
By the time a new product comes out, there has been MORE than enough time for due dillegance, and the answer should be apparent before release candidates are distributed, unless of course, you are an idiot, and your company sucks.
When a owner of smooth running Windows shop with dozens of .NET applications and centralized SharePoint askes me about switching to Linux to 'save a few bucks', I immediately do a quick cost/benefit analysis on whether or not I should just beat his ass and change professions.
Word 2007 is much better for technical documents. The features that were hidden in 2003 (like styles) are now very easily accessed. Another example is tables: in 2003, you either had to browse through menus to open the Tables and Borders toolbar and then close it to save screen space, now you simply switch to the Tables tab. Also, a lot of buttons have labels beside them, meaning you don't need to hold the cursor near every button for 1 second in order to see the tooltip. Oh, and did I mention instant previews when choosing styles?
And the new equation editor simply rocks. It combines the best of TeX, Classic Equation Editor and OpenOffice Writer's equivalent. You can write some TeX code, press the Space key and Word automatically converts it to a WYSIWYG formula, which behaves pretty much like the equations in the Classic version.
I've been using Office 2007 since it was released to MSDN Subscribers back in November.
I went into the upgrade with high expectations for the ribbon. I had read a lot about it, and honestly it just makes a lot of sense. Commands that are grouped logically and presented contextually, while at the same time not being buried in a menu that few will ever see, simply seems like the right way to do things.
At the same time I realized that I have been using Office for many, many years, and the fairly dramatic UI shift would probably result in some learning curve.
I was, however, pleasantly surprised. For the most part, commands are where they should be. If I want to change the alignment of some text I go to the layout tab. (Or just highlight the text and move my mouse toward the fading in popup thingy.) If I want to insert a picture, surprise surprise, I got to the insert tab. It all makes a lot of sense.
Furthermore, in just the couple of months that I've been using Office 2007, I've discovered a lot of functionality I never new existed. (And, as many of you know, most Office users only use a very small fraction of Office's features.)
Each Office upgrade before 2007 has, for the most part, been an exercise in adding features that few will ever use because they don't know they're there. Office 2007's new UI changes that. For many users, it will be like Microsoft added thousands of new features when, in fact, they've been there all along but were never seen.
If you can see some extension that people will want you can capitalize on it, if people will need to be trained you can train them, if it really is a useful innovation you can take advantage of it immediately.
However as you said it is a risk, as is any potentially worthwhile investment, and you have to decide for yourself whether it's worth it.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Hypothetically, then what if Microsoft made a new version of Word or Excel that was so awful nobody wanted to pay for it, and didn't work as well as their previous version that all business people already had.
What would you say if you were one of those who didn't upgrade, for those reasons, and someone sent you an indecipherable document?
If this started happening often, and you felt pressured to buy the overpriced but useless software, would you blame the other users? Or Microsoft? Or "business"?
Yeah, I've been using Office (predominantly Word) for 15 years too (migrating from Amiga WP), and I have to say that the "ribbon interface has a steep learning curve" is a week argument:
First, because he means the curve is shallow, not steep. A steep learning curve means something is easy to learn. If you doubt me, feel free to plot a "material learned/time" graph on the back of an envelope.
More seriously, what he means is that the interface is difficult to use. I've been using Office 2003 for 3 years, and every permutation before that, and I am still cursing the interface as buggy and counterintuitive. I hate contextual menus -- they mean I always have to check to see if the option I want is there, and it usually isn't. Microsoft ripped off that ill-advised Macintosh idea of making the computer "Smarter than the User", and the result is offensive.
Take one example: Every time I encounter an installation of Word that I have to use, the first thing I do is disable everything automatic that I can. But, of course, since I collaborate with folks in several languages, including ones that Word doesn't recognize, inevitably Word will still decide I'm writing in a language I have no intention to write in (e.g., Document was originally created in Austrian German, so every time I insert a footnote, it's in Austrian German). Now it runs automatic language support for that, including all that autoformatting crap that sucks even if I were writing in that language. Better yet, they enable the autoformatting, but require a consultation of a regional install disk to actually control it. So there's no bloody way to turn it off.
Will Office 2007 be better? I don't know, but complaining about the interface being hard to learn doesn't make any sense? Office's interface has never been intuitive or useful -- well, at least since Word 5.1 for the Macintosh (and for the record, I've never liked Apple either).
Yes, but lets be honest here, just how many office users are going to look for things to make their documents easily compatible, or even realise that such a need exists? Not a big number I would think.
Most people I know who use microsoft office and other microsoft products use them exclusively. I've made some inroads into converting people towards open source, but it's often too much work.
I had to change away from using openoffice and Latex for my documents during my phd because my supervisor insisted everything must be in microsoft formats, as did the department I was in. That was everything from papers to lecture materials. As this was a computer science dept I was somewhat amazed. I was at one point the *only* person there actively encouraging use of open source tools.
This wasn't a place I was happy be to be at, hence why I am no longer there.