A couple of weeks back I made the mistake of upgrading my Office 2003 to the bright and shiny Office 2007.
First of all, the new ribbons (huge toolbars for those of you who haven’t seen them) replacing menus are just pissing me off. The first couple of days I thought I was just going to adapt and learn how to find stuff on the ribbons. Simply put, this has not happened. I’m still struggling to find even to most basic things, adding significantly on the time I need to spend on tasks I don’t even enjoy doing. Adding insult to injury, there are things that I used in Office 2003 that I haven’t found at all (such as resetting the language on a selection in Powerpoint that contains mixed languages, the button just disappears). Not sure if it gone or if I’m just to stupid to find it among all icons and random buttons in strange locations (how about that Options button hidden at the bottom of the new application icon menu). And if these ribbons are all that good that Microsoft choose to throw out all menus (without any way of restoring them), shouldn’t they be used in all Office applications? Outlook still uses the menus just like before.
Second, I can’t seem to find options I used in Office 2003. The options panel back then was, arguable, pretty complex due to the amount of options. The new is greatly reduced in complexity, as far as I can see simply by removing options. That’s not a good solution.
Third, the performance is just crap. I’m on a fairly new Thinkpad with 2 Gb of RAM, one would think applications should be running blazing fast (most other do). However, all the Office applications are ridiculously slow. Opening a Word document now takes something like three times longer than in Office 2003. Outlook now integrates the indexed search that previously was available using the excellent Lookout plugin. Lookout was able to find all matching emails quite a bit quicker than the new search even switches to the search result panel, let alone shows any results.
Is this really the best Microsoft can do on their flagship product? They should have all their smartest people working on the Office team (those not busy with Vista of course) and still, this is the crap they ship? I just set OpenOffice to be the default option for all Office documents and I’m very happy with that choice. Writer will start and open a Word document faster than Word manages to show the splash screen (yes, really). Unfortunately, I’m still on Outlook as I have yet to find a worthy replacement, Evolution on Linux looks promising but doesn’t yet have the polish. But, at least Outlook (still) has menus.
All in all, moving to OpenOffice only makes my planned migration to Ubuntu that much easier. So, the end result might be positive.
March 31st, 2007 at 10:09 pm
Cheers,
Stephan
April 22nd, 2007 at 3:03 pm
However, I would not recommend it to anyone who are current users of *ANY* office applications (ie. MS-Office, OpenOffice, Star Office, WordPerfect etc…). Why? Because everything you’ve learnt and the way you worked now requires a whole new thought process!
Microsoft (as with their Vista) has become very efficient at screwing things up! Seriously!
If you need a Windows-based solution, then make sure you get your hands on Office 2003 and Windows XP SP2 !!! Note: Even Dell has rolled-back and began reselling machines with Windows XP - after customers complaints!
Percival
(don’t buy Vista - you’ll be wasting your productivity and selling out your business)
April 27th, 2007 at 9:59 am
However, I was using the trial on an old P3 and the speed was fine, so I suggest there might be something wrong with your system, Protocol7.
I’m at a loss what to do because Word 2002 is a bit buggy on my system. Word 2007 is stronger with refreshing the window and other problems I had, but it’s taken away customisation of the interface. It’s one step forward, one step back. Hm.
Percival, do you know if Word 2003 is much better than Word 2002?
Martin.