Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food
Just Say No to Office 2007
Yesterday I was at Vanderbilt law school to present a paper on shareholder activism. My host kindly made available an empty office with a computer for my use during my brief stay. I need to work on my PowerPoint presentation, so I spent a few horrific moments struggling with PowerPoint 2007. Vanderbilt had updated their computers to Office 2007, something the highly intelligent and responsible information technology folks here at UCLA have thus far declined to do. My brief exposure suggests that Office 2007 is a nightmare. In the first place, the new program interfaces make Word and PowerPoint almost unrecognizable. The menus and toolbars are such a confusing mishmash that I could not even find the “save as” command. In the second, a number of simple tasks seemed to take more time and more mouse clicks to accomplish than they did in 2003. In the third, Help now seems to be a single massive resource covering the entirety of the Office suite of programs, which made finding a PowerPoint specific answer unnecessarily difficult.
And these are just the problems that cropped up in a few minutes. I can’t imagine how many problems are going present themselves once I actually am forced to start doing serious work with Office 2007. But there is a solution. My beloved little ASUS laptop introduced me to OpenOffice.org. So if my IT people try to force me into using Office 2007, I may just affect the Open Office for good.
Oh no! I think I’m attending a “how to” on vista with our UCLAW information systems people no later than tomorrow. Hang onto your linux!
I’m still stewing over the DOCX business. What a joke.
I also find Vista terribly overrated.
I think we can safely say Microsoft stunk in 2007. I’m keeping Office 2003 on the desktop as long as I can (the laptop was already infested with 2007 when I bought it).
Does microsoft not understand the concept of backward compatibility?
Nope, Mike. I take it you’ve tried to open Office 2007 (or even Works 2007) documents on older computers; it can’t be done if it was saved in the default format.
One of the most frustrating things about Word 2007 is that it doesn’t print envelopes correctly no matter how much you tinker with it.
There are some neat features in the new Powerpoint - but many of them don’t work unless the computer you use for the presentation has Office 2007.
I’m a power user of Word, and used to teach Word 97, along with other Office 97 programs. Switching over to Office 07 in January caused me a couple of weeks of irritation, but I am mostly used to it now. The biggest problem for me is that, as an attorney handling significant transactional work, I need to use the Review toolbar functions constantly. In 07, you need to switch to it in the ribbon, which takes one or two more clicks each time, depending on which function it is. It’s a small difference, but an annoying one.
The backwards compatibility issue is relatively easily solved by saving in 97-03 format, or by getting other people in the office to add a converter for docx to their Office 03.
However, I have already noticed that Excel 07 is more capable. The changes there seem to be all for the good so far. Then again, I am no longer the power Excel user I once was.
On backwards compatibility: it may be “easy” to solve the DOCX problem by having 03 users search around for the right converter, but for God’s sake, why should I have to do that at all? Why not just make the DOCX files capable of being opened in DOC format? Why I should be pushed to go “looking for things” to make documents from newer Word programs readable on my computer is beyond me.
I can only imagine the headache for people for whom looking around the web for the converter is not a simple matter.
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I upgraded, mostly without thinking, from Office 97. What a catastrophe! I am good at this kind of stuff but the 2007 interface is just so awful that it has stumped me. If you only worked with it for a short time you have missed many of its most pathetic features. Run and hide from this monstrosity.