Show Office 2007 Who's the Boss

jcatcw writes "Microsoft knows how you like your Office Suite. You like Ribbons ... they're a given, right? Well, if not, Computerworld reviews some third-party packages that allow you to customize the software's interface. Classic Menu gives you an Office-2003-like set of menus. It'll help you navigate old menu structures to find favorite commands, but don't expect to use all the familiar keyboard shortcuts. ToolbarToggle lets you customize the menus. However, Classic Menu has two advantages over ToolbarToggle: It's available for PowerPoint today, and it includes Office 2007 commands on its menus, a modification you can't make to ToolbarToggle menus. RibbonCustomizer works within the Ribbon's own constraints to let you change the display of icons and commands on existing tabs or any new ones you create."

Comments

10 years ago called

[Anonymous Coward]

in soviet russia, the joke wants you back

Man, just get used to it

[Overneath42]

Seriously, why do people fear change so much? The new Office design is much better than any previous version, in my opinion. No more hunting around in nested menus trying to find features - everything is right there in plain sight. Sure, there's a learning curve, but is it really so steep?

I think there are valid complaints about Office 2007 (namely, the new .*x format, which has tripped my fiancee up more than once in trying to print papers at school after typing them at home), but the design shouldn't be one of them.

Re:Man, just get used to it

[cmacb]

Seriously, why do people fear change so much?

More and more people are not fearing change and are changing to things like Open Office and web-based word processing. I used to preach at people about the advantages of Linux and Open Source. Made very little headway, because people don't like change. Now they have a choice between changes forced on them by Microsoft, and an old interface (Open Office) that looks more like the old Office than the new Office does. Now I'm helping companies make the switch. Thank you Microsoft!

Funny, if some other company had vended something that looked exactly like Vista and the new Office, MS would have put out a study describing the very high costs of user retraining. You can only mislead your customers so much with this sort of nonsense before you achieve total loss of credibility, at that point even when you tell them the truth they are not inclined to believe you. I think Microsoft has finally achieved this goal, although why they would have wanted to I can't say, maybe just some inside joke among marketing people. Clearly the company is not run by techies.

Re:Man, just get used to it

[Poorcku]

this was the first Office UI change in how many years?

Re:Man, just get used to it

[SEMW]

Ask anyone who has worked in an office environment (not geeks) and they'll tell you that most people use very basic functions like bold/font/size, bullets, formatting and mail merge. Looking at the only concrete examples you actually include in your post: bold, font/size, bullets, and all the rest of the formatting options are in exactly the same place as they always were, and all the old keyboard shortcuts to them still work. The only one out of your list that's changed is Mail merge, which is now in "mailings" rather than the old, generic "tools" -- much, much more obvious than before. And the old keyboard accelerator for it still works.

Re:Man, just get used to it

[hazem]

No, it's not just "new features" but more importantly old features that they make work quite differently.

Go to Excel 2000 and put a column of numbers in columns A, B, and D. Hit CTRL-A to "select ALL" and do a sort.

Now do the same in Excel 2003.

You'll find that in Excel 2003, it tries to guess what you mean by "select ALL" and will only select and sort column A and B. If you sort your data, the data in column D is no longer associated with the data in A and B.

In this obvious example, you can see it didn't select all. But suppose you have an excel sheet that has many columns and you want to sort them like you always have... ctrl-A and sort. In excel 2003 you may end up breaking all of your data.

This exact thing happened to me and I lost almost a day of work because the file I was working on was ruined and I only figured it out after getting very strange results.

Why in the hell do they take something as long-standing and nearly universal as Ctrl-A and change what it does? Oh right, because if it's a standard, Microsoft will try to break it - even if it's their own standard.

Ah, Office - the Brazil of software

[rueger]

Although I keep defaulting back to MS Office - Open Office just isn't quite enough and isn't quite interchangable enough with people using Office - I still hate the the damned thing. It's like software designed by Terry Gilliam.

I hate the way it formats stuff whether I want it or not. I hate that it automatically changes URLs and e-mail addresses into links, even though I'm creating print documents. I REALLY hate that copied text from elsewhere is pasted in with whatever format it had elsewhere, not with the format of the text on the page that I'm editing.

And I hate that it is invariably difficult or impossible to turn this crap off.

I sincerely fear every new release of MS Office specifically because I need to beat it into submission to make it behave as if I'm in charge.

I don't even know what a "ribbon" is, but I'm sure that I'll hate that too.

I applaud your courage.

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one find your public support of Open Office in the face of slashdot's well-known anti-Open Office bias inspiring. You're not just putting your life on the line by boldly supporting software with a great many zealous supporters, but your karma too. You, sir, are an American Hero. A hero sir. Your example of courage will outlive us all.

Monkeysoft Office Anonymous

[Dystopian Rebel]

Friend, have you lost sleep worrying about whether you'll fail adapt to the stupendous User Interface innovations in the latest Monkeysoft Office?

How many times have you found yourself saying, "I could understand this global warming analysis model better if only I could see it on a Monkeysoft Powerpoint slide with those animated bullets that enter from the left or right of the slide"?

How many times have you found yourself thinking, "I don't even know what an OS is, I only need Monkeysoft Windows to run Monkeysoft Office, otherwise I could be using A Bantu or OS Ecstacy or whatever that piercing-faced kid in IS&T is using these days"?

How many times have you found yourself skipping a few StarCups coffees every week for a few months so you could buy yourself the latest version of Monkeysoft Office?

How many times have you found yourself thinking, "I don't get upset about viruses, they are an inevitable part of life even if they cost billions and are propagated by dimwits using Monkeysoft Office, soytenly not me"?

Don't worry, there's help. Join Slashdot's Monkeysoft Anonymous Forum, where people just like you are helping one another learn to live without Monkeysoft, one precious day at a time.

in which a 20-year Word vet learns about ctrl-z...

[Daltorak]

I'm calling bullshit on your post. Let's dig in.

As a Word user since 1986, who knows the program pretty well , I must agree that the ribbon is a jumbled mess with important stuff deeply hidden. It was a big disappointment. It took me quite a while to find even the undo command. The Undo command is directly beside the Save command, on the tool bar. It's always visible. The icons look exactly the same as in Word 2003. The only difference is that, unlike Word 2003 where by default it was buried in a mess of unrelated icons and commands (between paste and insert hyperlink, below the Window menu, above the Bold/Italic/Underline icons), it's given more prominence.

Oh, and if you've been using Word since 1986, you should know by now that Undo is Ctrl-Z, just like it is in every other Windows, Linux, and Mac application (s/Ctrl/Command/). You shouldn't ever have to use a mouse to undo or redo something.

Next!

Inserting a footnote now requires a whole series of mouse clicks as far as I can tell. Press Alt+S, F, and start typing your footnote. It's two mouse extremely obvious clicks (References, Insert Footnote) if you really need to go to your mouse to do it.

Next!

Go try something relatively obscure like turning on line numbering in a document and changing the style of the line numbers. It's a lot easier to do line numbering in 2007 than it is in 2003. In 2003, you had to go digging into the File menu -> Page Setup -> Layout tab -> click Line Numbers -> and click the Add Line Numbering checkbox. In Word 2007, you click the Page Layout tab, click Line Numbers, and choose from the drop-down list that appears how you want the line numbers to work. Easy peasy.

As for changing the style of line numbers, it's basically the same in Word 2003 and 2007: Set it up using the style palette. In both versions, by default, the "Line Number" style won't be shown in the palette until you are using line numbers. If you're planning on changing styles, you really ought to know how to use the style palette.

Next!

Damned, though, if I can see any really new major features that make it worthwhile. Here's a partial list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2007 #Microsoft_Office_Word

One of the less obvious new features that's actually a really huge improvement, is the "Building Blocks" system. You can create and re-use "things"; for example, you can create a specific format, layout, and text content for a presentation of your company's mission statement, or maybe it's just a set of paragraphs you use over and over between a lot of documents. You can get a sense of how this works by going to the Insert menu and playing around with the Text Box and Quick Parts features.

I write user interface design documents as part of my professional work, and this one feature alone has saved me hours of time, and my documents look better to boot. Word 2007 has already paid for itself several times over.