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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
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 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!
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?
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
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.
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.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
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...
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...
Can I not use that same argument for not switching to Linux?
You could, but dude, your karma would take a beating around here.
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.
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!!
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.
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!
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.
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.