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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?."
a) Because Bill says so
b) Because muppets keep sending you files in a new, super incompatible format that you can't open otherwise
switch to OOo and for that matter, why not OOo on Linux... the training costs for the upgrade to Vista and/or office 2007 might as well be considered as similar to those for switching away from the proprietary lockin and moving to truly open formats for your data. Then you will have jumped off the upgrade treadmill and will be free to upgrade at your own pace instead, when you want to rather than when outside pressures force you to...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
FTA: While I have the utmost respect for Mr Mossberg, I can't help but feel that the words in the second paragraph contradict and negate the words of the first. To my mind, a logical layout of commands and functions would obviate the need to learn how to find those commands and functions.
While I have the utmost respect for Mr. Beer, I can't help but feel that he has laid out an impossibly high standard for software menus. Is it even possible to, as he puts it, "obviate the need to learn how to find those commands and functions?"
Take what I said with a grain of salt, I'm bitter 'cause wish I had a kewl last name like his. Cue the "free-as-in-beer jokes." In 3, 2, 1...
These arguments are EXACTLY the arguments used with every major innovation in the past.
DOS vs Windows anyone?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Why the same reason you install any Microsoft Software, because you like a challenge.
All the article says is "the ribbon interface is less intuitive than the menu driven one, and it takes time to learn".
Meanwhile, Office 2007 would probably be mandatory for new functionality in new products from Microsoft - just as Office 2003 is mandatory for some functionality (edit in dataview) for Sharepoint Server 2003
"A question that must be asked then is whether some of the time taken to master Office 2007 would be better used to gain a more advanced knowledge of Office 2003, with the rest of the time being used to do some productive work? After trialling Office 2007 for some weeks, while away from home base, I believe the answer is a resounding yes."
A better question would be 'whether some of the time taken to master Office 2007 would be better used to gain a knowledge of OpenOffice, reducing our need to jump every time Microsoft releases a new version of office'.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
Microsoft isn't holding a gun to your head. You don't have a need for a ribbon. You may find out later that it increases your productivity and then you may learn that it provides a better solution for your problems. But if you're accomplishing your job and tasks with older copies of Office, why do you need 2007? The fact is you probably don't. I myself am quite successful with OpenOffice.org but I don't use the spreadsheet much if at all.
Hell, as long as Microsoft keeps supporting the copy of Office you use, who cares about 2007? Let the early adopters play around with it and work the bugs out. I'll use the ribbon when everyone else is--no reason for me to learn another "J++" Microsoft product only to have that skill be completely useless. Office 2007 will probably be the de facto standard but why pay the price and risk of an early adopter?
We're all intelligent people here (I think), and we're all capable of weighing the pros and cons of software. Office 2007 should be no different. If you want to present a good article to me on 2007, I'd like to see all sides of the issue, not just telling me why I need to use it.
My work here is dung.
The banner might be more attractive to true first-time users, but will pose a whole new learning hurdle for rare users and much more for users with simple requirements (80+% of all users). The tasks have moved and now are much less obvious.
MS has shot themselves in the foot again. I don't know whether they hit an artery.
Someone here at my job has Office 2007 installed. It has some weird graphical things, like transparant popup windows when selecting text. this window shows options like bold/italic, etc. when moving the mouse over it, it slowly fades in. Moving the mouse out of the window makes it transparent again. I really don't see the use of it. Then there is this OSX background and still too much buttons.
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.
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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.
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The only feature I have heard of that makes me want to upgrade is the ability to have more than 65,536 rows in excel. Of course, if you have that many rows of data, maybe you should be converting the data into a real database format and working with the data that way.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
It supports saving/loading backwards compatible formats too...
It also had a surprisingly low learning curve for me, despite the vastly more accessible UI it seems to have than 2003 with its menu jungles.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
There are some useful features in Office 2007. However, you have to evaluate whether those features are necessary enough to overcome the upgrade costs as well as the re-training that will be involved with the new interface. Some people really want/need the new features. The problem for MS is that most users are just fine with the features from Office 97.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
But before I answer that, can someone tell me why I should upgrade from Word 95? And the only justification I can think of to upgrade to Word 95 is long filename support.
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.
The only reason to switch to 2007 will be to read the documents that others send you. This is nothing new. When the organisation for which I work switched to 2003, for example, it was not because we needed any of the "functionality" new to 2003. Nor had our users pushed Office to its limits and were crying out for new functionality. Let's be clear, 95% of users use maybe 5% of an office suite's functionality. The other 5% use maybe 50%, at best.
But Microsoft never fails to make the new Office write files, by default, that the old Office can't read. Eventually, one grows fatigued with having to send a reply to every email asking that the sender "save the document in Word 2003, please, so I can open it."
This is the way MS has sold each and every one of its upgrades. It's a tried-and-true strategy for them and they've made billions from it. Why would anyone expect them to change at this juncture?
Give a man a match: warm him for an instant. Douse him in petrol and set him aflame: warm him for the rest of his life.
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.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
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The ability to open large datasets in Excel, instead of having to use vim to figure out what the structure is. I'll be pleasantly surprised if the rest of the features aren't a step backwards, but it'll still be worth it the next time I have to figure out why SAS is choking on some huge text file.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
As you are the first person who claims to use the colaboration features (I assume that is what you mean by "simplifies processes") I have heard I would love to hear more about how you use it.
Funny how you are so keen on a feature that MS has been marketing heavilly and that most real users do not care about.
What exactly do you mean by "ties up our services"?
Let me see if I can translate that:
My business just loves the new features, but I'm not going to tell you which new features we love, and why we love them! Nyah nyah!
And you got modded +5 Insightful... Amazing...
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.
I've been using Excel for nearly 15 years, and for the entirety of that time, I've been limited to 256 columns. Now the limit is 16,384 columns. This may not seem like much to the average person, but to a little abused VBA monkey who's had to use every trick in the book to handle the manipulation of big WIDE data, this is a godsend.
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.
Well, we researched the product, and while Office 2007 isn't a bad thing, its way too damn expensive. When we are looking to upgrade 125+ licenses, its going to cost us way more than any of us can justify, no matter how cool the options are. We are currently running Office 2000 and our next "upgrade" is, Open Office.
I've been here long enough to know the reasons i upgrade aren't the same reasons anyone else would consider it.
7
My point is, i've explained myself MILLIONS of times to the slashdot crowd and they always point out how those features are useless, misleading or done in other products but they forget the simple fact that Software is a Solution and as long as it solves your needs, fits your budget and is easy to use & integrate then it doesn't matter what other people think.
Too many times i get drilled down for all the wrong reasons, so if you can't find whats right with something on your own then what *I* say won't make any difference to you.
Not my fault this place is stacked with ignorant users.
For a list of features:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_200
As for streamlining our business, we use Microsoft CRM and our smaller offices uses Accounting 2007 Pro and tying everything together through Office 2k7 is easy as 1-2-3. We use services in Windows 2003, Windows Longhorne Server, SharePoint, Jboss Portal, and Jahia app server to tie things together, share files and publish services/data to our clients and extranet/intranet portals.
Users love it, thats all that we needed. Upgrade was a breeze and included as part of our services.
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
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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 go two layers deep into the "Tools" menu, you'll see that "Auto-Astroturf" is by default enabled, where it automatically monitors RSS feeds for relevant discussions and posts pro-Office messages without user intervention!
2) Want to see how a change will affect your document without changing it? Just put your mouse over a document skin or formatting and the document will temporarly "apply" the changes for you. The formatting will reverse to normal when your mouse is out of the area.
3)The new contextual spelling checker.
4)Building Blocks. Great time saver That's only from the op of my head, but of course if you are a average slashdotter MS could add *real gold* toolbars and you won't like it, so...
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
oh come on, either talk about something you have a clue about or stop lying. you can download a little tool free from MS
here that lets you read new office 2007 files in older versions.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Compatibility Pack for 2007 File Formats.
Also see Word Viewer 2003, Excel Viewer 2003, Visio 2002 Viewer, Word 97/2000 Converter for Word 6, etc.
Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement of closed formats; rather, an alternative for staying software version/vendor-independent.
WordPerfect 4.x was almost perfect - NO CLUTTER AT ALL. What was on the screen was your document. WP5.1 hid its menus nicely - they were GONE unless you needed them, then you could Alt-= and see them. Still no clutter while editing. Windows programs originally had a menu bar, but were mostly clutter free. Then they got a row of icons (SmartIcons in Ami Pro, later added to MS Office) and a status bar. Word then got a row of menus, TWO ROWS OF ICONS, and a status bar. Now there's more clutter - a "ribbon bar" (and I've only seen screen shots, not used it) and who knows what else. Meanwhile, the point of a word processor is to process your words, not deal with all the clutter on the screen. Anything that sacrifices screen real estate that belongs to your document's words for anything else is not an improvement and not progress. I think in all the race to add features to Word, they've completely forgotten the point of the program.
If I upgraded today I'd be putting a mostly untested, untried, totally unproven product into production on every system in my enterprise. If I did that, the only thing I would be 'ignoring' is the voice of my own experience... ANd that voice is screaming at me not to trust a 1.0 of anything, least of all from Microsoft.
Feel free to jump first into Office 2007... It is "early adopters" who miss some crucial detail (or who get hammered with an enterprise-wide shutdown when the first zero-day bug is successfully exploited by virus and worm writers) who make my job simpler... Who, in the long run, pay my bills through huge emergency consulting fees, and make my arguments for security that much easier to make.
Again, we've got a huge installed base of Office 2003 users who are doing great--why would I disrupt their productivity for one or two minor improvements? Nobody in my enterprise is doing spreadsheets large enough to trigger the bug described in this thread... With that exception, what "Feature" is missing from Office 2003 that I need so desperately... I don't see it yet, and probably the only reason we (eventually) do it is to "keep up with the Joneses"--but that's not for another year or more.
As for Vista? I'm hoping to ride out Windows XP until we can move the desktops away from Windows entirely. We'll see if I get my wish or not...
Who did what now?
I've been showing Office 2007 off for quite some time now to my clients, people I work with at the local university, and friends of mine.
Not once has their response been "where is the file menu?" or "where are my icons?" Each time they've seen the ribbon and thought "Oh, that is smart!" They see how easy it is to change margins or add a Header/Footer and immediately want to know when they can buy it.
Will businesses think it's worth $400 per desk? If it saves that employee about an hour of time every month, because they can do tasks faster now, then it pays for itself quite quickly.
That's not mentioning how much *better* things look when created in Office 2007 using their new features. Have you seen the new shape rendering tools? Professional looking slides can be created in PowerPoint without the aide of the graphic design guys. Same goes for charts.
Employees will make better use of styles in Word, conditional formatting in Excel, all because the features are easier to find now.
People who boo-hoo Microsoft really need to sit down in front of Office 2007 for ten minutes and just check out its new features. Throw out your old ideas of menus and icons and just give it a try before you bash it.
-David
"My point is, i've explained myself MILLIONS of times to the slashdot crowd"
:-)
But.. how?! You only have 1013 posts!
Not seen 2007, probably won't. But THE biggest thing that irks me about Office, Word in particular, as we use 2002, is that things which seem absolutely commonsense to use EASILY, BECAUSE they are rarely used are strangely difficult or damn near impossible. Why is making a TOC so problematic and why does it take so much work. Why do pasted in tables take on a margin arrangement life of their own? Why do random words think they have to be spelled checked in French when the other 99% of the docyument is clearly written in English and is spell checked in English? Why is formatting text in a footer so damn hard? Especially something like not counting an arbitrary number of pages up front, like the rest of the publishing industry for the past 150 years? The point is, these things are hard because they're only used rarely. I'm sure that if had to monkey with it every day I'd memorize the 90 steps needed to do it. But why? Also why does font mapping between MS office and Notes just suck? Seems that 'Arial' should be 'Arial' and if it's 10pt in one doc it shouldn't naturally be converted to 24pt bold in another.
BTW - the differences in the interface between 2002 an 2003 are almost completely for the sake of upgrading and eye candy alone. Except for the annoying default that checks help ONLINE which is really a huge pain the ass.
I submit that MS spends little time actually bothering to find out what people what, and how they use it and they instead assume that whatever they like must be what we would naturally prefer too. OO is no better either since it follows MS's lead.
Having said that, I can appreciate you folks who have to use spreadsheets to run your business and you might actually have a real need to use some of those high end obscure functions. Me? No. And no thanks. I think it's a shame that you have to run business functions in a glorified spreadsheet and wordprocessor though or that we have an 'Office Suite' that attempts to compose memos and keep the books and make toast and service the wife, etc....maybe that's the approach that's wrong. My wife runs our rental properties and budgets with a spreadsheet and no matter what I tell her about something basic like MS Money she won't use it. And please make no mistake she knows jack shit about Excel and can't use it beyond typing anyway.
Anyway the problem with MS Office is that it's arbitrary. If the new version is still arbitrary then it's shit. If it's new kinds of arbitrary then it's shit. Either make my life easier or go away. I do not need to learn new workarounds.
In the mac world, word 6 actually had fewer features and was harder to use than mac word 5. the difference was that it was identical to the PC product. that is, they advanced the PC product to have features that were already in the mac product, and then regressesed and reskinned the mac product ot make it identical. I remember my extreme rage, shared by many, at this and vowen not to upgrade. Then after a month or so I got a critical contract application form in word 6. I could not read it in word 5 and had to buy word 6. so yes to your question.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
[quote]As for streamlining our business, we use Microsoft CRM and our smaller offices uses Accounting 2007 Pro and tying everything together through Office 2k7 is easy as 1-2-3. We use services in Windows 2003, Windows Longhorne Server, SharePoint, Jboss Portal, and Jahia app server to tie things together, share files and publish services/data to our clients and extranet/intranet portals.[/quote]
/sarcasm.
Except you're not running unix/linux/macOS and therefore completely insecure and really stupid for not using my OS. Oh god what a tard for not doing things this way, that way, the other way, blah blah blah.
If it works, it works. Simple as that. It works for me, the UI isn't so bad that you can't learn it, the format can be changed, you can still save as earlier compatible versions with not much issue, so I agree with you - no problem.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
It is possible to explain something more than once per post.
It is possible to explain something more than once per post.
It is possible to explain something more than once per post.
WE did the same here. WE are sticking with Office 97. it works great, does everything we need and works way faster than office 2000 or higher does.
Those that will whine about outlook, we do not use it we use a different groupware setup that does not lock us into Microsoft on the server side.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
All I really want to know is how unobtrusive it can be. Word 2003 seems congenitally incapable of letting me write an entire sentence without doing something to distract me from the thought I'm trying to express. And you have to go all over the place to turn all that crap off. "Ooh! That looks like an e-mail address! Let's have a deep conversation with Outlook then make a hyperlink!" "Ooh! That file server called monday has a name just like a day of the week! Let's capitalize that word!" "Ooh! Someone you never met who worked here a few years ago wrote something with those three words in the title. Let's put some tiny dots underneath!" STFU and let me type.
This is not my sandwich.
The worst incompatibility that users are likely to encounter between Mac/PC Office files: images pasted from the Mac clipboard (or drag/dropped from the Safari browser) show up fine as long as you're on a Mac, but an erroneous "Quicktime / TIFF decompressor could not be found" error appears in its stead if you open it on a PC.
Dragged-and-dropped image files from the Finder are fine, as are those put in via Insert > Image. But, copy/paste is done far more often.
This has been going on at least as far back as Mac Ofice 98, and is still in v2004. All MS had to do was auto-convert the pasted image to whatever format MS normally uses (Windows Metafile perhaps; it's certainly not BMP or JPG). Macs, after all, have no issue viewing images pasted into the Windows versions of Office.
The "compatibility checker" in Mac Office 2004 doesn't catch this. Imagine an electronically-submitted assignment--the average Mac user has no clue it's broken, and another point goes to MS when the PC user thinks to himself ahah, Macs ARE less compatible!
Software is a Solution and as long as it solves your needs, fits your budget and is easy to use & integrate then it doesn't matter what other people think.
I find this a very interesting statement coming from someone who represents themself as a businessman.
The successful businesspersons I know are always very concerned about what two groups of people are thinking: their customers and their competitors. That is in the front of their minds whenever they are addressing a group that might hold either a customer or a competitor, even slashdot. But you appear to be too independent a thinker to worry about those outsiders. By buying now into MS Office 2007 (and I presume Vista in all its glory), you are willing to pioneer new approaches to business data flows.
That means taking your eye off the ball for a moment while you budget in the added costs of software, hardware, and arrange for installations and staff training. And you can bet you will be distracted a few more times when you find that the training has to be modified to fit unexpected aspects of usage, new procedures need to be set up to take advantage of the new capabilities, and those new procedures have to be shaken down before they work right.
Meanwhile, some of your competitors are planning to stick with their old systems for a while. The money and effort they are NOT putting into an upgrade process is available for other things— such as a concerted effort to target your customer base. They can and will promise demonstrated performance in critical areas of customer satisfaction where, for the moment, all you can offer is blue sky promises of being able to do better than you used to do. The money you are spending on your upgrade they can and will spend on new customer incentive programs. They can and will say that they are watching your experiment very closely, and will make a similar change if it looks like it will work out for you.
If you are the first in your industry to take on an expensive and unproven upgrade, your customer base will shrink; your revenues will be depressed; and your immediate expenses will clearly be higher. Unless it is sliding toward bankruptcy and needs a miracle, it is always better to be the second business in the industry to do the upgrade dance. Wait until someone else has blazed the trail; pick up his ex customers while he's busy planning his route and building bridges, learn from his experiences and avoid his mistakes.
A quote borrowed from Jeff Duntemann is appropriate: It's the pioneers who catch the arrows.
Or I can right-click on it, open it in Excel, figure out what's going on and start writing the SAS import script, Python analysis, database structure or whathaveyou within 10 seconds of getting the file, instead of puzzling over the man page for awk or sed. No one gives you a gold star (or at least no one gives me a gold star) for being too 1337 to use Excel.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
This is in fact the major argument against upgrading to GNU/Linux. Retraining put the TCO above the already known Microsoft software.
The fun thing is that same the argument doesn't apply when switching to a different version of the Microsoft software, even if the UI change is larger.
*ahem*
You can download a 60-day trial of Office 2007 right now, and one of those versions is the "$150 for three PCs" Student & Home edition.