What Were They Thinking?

[chris_gerrib]

I just today upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007 on my work PC. All I can ask is, "what the f#(@ were they thinking?!?!"

First, just getting the box with the CD in it was a 5-minute challenge, since instead of opening like a book, the inner case pivots out from the outer case like a pocketknife. Then, after a 20-minute install, I fired up Word.

Ye gods it's fugly! There are three color schemes, of which only baby blue is remotely tolerable. But it gets worse.

All the menus have changed, so finding something becomes a game of Guess What That Damn Icon Does, with a side round of What Menu View Would That Be Under. I use a lot of Microsoft Styles for business writing, so I can do automatic table of contents and text headings. Well, now, if you select text and drag the mouse over a Style icon, the text changes, but doesn't stay changed until you click on the Style. Of course, the "preview change" means that heaven help you if you forgot what style the heading was (like if editing and the phone rings, which of course never happens at work, right?) because you've got to unselect everything to revert!

Office 2007 still has the annoying tendency to want to auto-format text in weird ways and not allow the user to change it, so the one thing I wish they fixed isn't. And at 300 MB installed on the disk, it isn't a low footprint.

It appears all of my users are going to need training for the upgrade. That's the bad news. The worse news is, Office is standard in business, so it's not like I can go with something else.

Comments

[bdunbar.livejournal.com]

What Were They Thinking?
The worse news is, Office is standard in business, so it's not like I can go with something else.

I'm channeling Ernestine ...

We're Microsoft - we don't have to care

[jetfx.livejournal.com]

This is why I use Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/). Not only is it free, it's way superior to any commercial offering out there, just like Mozilla Firefox.

[bdunbar.livejournal.com]

it's way superior to any commercial offering out there,

That brings up a question for me - how do you qualify 'superior' for a word processor? I use Office 2007 on my windows desktop, NeoOffice on my Mac - as far as I can tell they both 'just work'.

Since one of the uses I have for Excel is to fill out a time sheet that depends on macros that pull down data from files found by UNC one could argue that in my case Office is superior to NeoOffice - I can do stuff with it that NeoOffice can't.

But really it's irrelevant in a business how 'excellent' Office is. Or isn't. Business - usually - picks software based on features and cost not excellence.

[bdunbar.livejournal.com]

Whoops - forgot the last paragraph.

In the case of Office there are other issues that inform the choice. You've got integration with Exchange, document transfer between other organizations.

[jetfx.livejournal.com]

Well, for one thing it does more than just a word processor, it's an entire office suite. Plus there is none of that annoying bit about word processors only saving it's files in its own format. I can save open office documents in any text file format to run on any word processor, so anything I write can be opened on any computer. Open Office was designed to side step all the interoperability issues.

[bdunbar.livejournal.com]

Open Office was designed to side step all the interoperability issues.

It's not working so hot, then. I saved a spreadsheet in the default ODP file format .... and the admin couldn't open it in Excel.

Now, granted, this was my fault - I knew better. But just saying that OO steps aside those issues is not quite accurate, unless all you use is OO.

Plus there is none of that annoying bit about word processors only saving it's files in its own format.

Last time I used Word I could save in rtf, word, a variety of WP dialects, ascii. Using a bit of behind the scenes magic the users at work can save in PDF as well.


I'm not saying that OO is not suited for your own use - you're probably happy with it. But you can't just take a business with a few thousand users and terabytes of document storage and just change stuff around, or say that MS Office is the inferior product; it depends on the circumstances.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

I could just say "ditto" to Brian Dunbar, but I'll add that, in the bank's case, some of our banking software makes calls to Office documents to generate customer forms.

Having had to support WordPerfect users in a Word-oriented business, I know full well the interoperability problems (AKA "urgent and aggravated help desk calls") that Open Office would generate.