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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?."
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
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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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.
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.
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.
Can I not use that same argument for not switching to Linux?
You could, but dude, your karma would take a beating around here.
It's not entirely true that the new formats will force you to upgrade. There is the Office Compatibility Pack which allows Office 2003 + XP to open and save OpenXML formats as well as convert between them.8 6761033.aspx
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA1016
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.
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 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.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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!!
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
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.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
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.