Office 2007 [modified]

[Joe Woodbury]

I hated the ribbon bar from day one. Still, I though my wife and kids might like it so I talked it up. My youngest daughter (13)--who does a lot of writing--was very excited. A day later, she meekly asked if I could put the "old" word back on. Most surprising is that she made several very specific and valid criticisms. My wife added several of her own. (The common criticism from all of us is why do you use up all that room for stuff I'll never use?) Funny thing is I left Excel 2007 on one system since I figured it was so rarely used, the ribbon might be helpful. One day my wife tried using it and called me up in frustration for help. I forgot it was 2007 and started walking her through the steps as if it were 2003. There was a long silence and she asked what I was talking about. (That was almost as bad as when my oldest daughter called and forgot to say she was using Works and was even more confused.) That aside, what utterly baffles me about Office 2007 is why they didn't have a simple button to re-skin the applications to look like Office 2003. You can get very close with enough patience, but not quite there. IE7 is the same way. Oh and then there's the lack of a "Save My Settings" wizard. So once I got Word on one computer more or less looking like Word 2003, I couldn't share that with the other computer. (And when that computer went south--bug between nForce4 and SATA--I would have been SOL. Fortunately, I was using Word 2003 and save and back up my settings and was back in business in a flash. "Save my settings" should be a feature on all software.)

Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke

[Joe Woodbury]

I really irks me to have to pay for a feature that Microsoft should have implemented. (I'll wager they didn't because they knew most users would have switched to "classic" mode immediately.)

Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke

[Dave Parker]

Ditto. Had to change to it at work because now all the timesheets and things are in 2007 format and cannot easily be converted to 2003. As well as it taking ages to find anything on the ribbon thing there are tons of other things that irritate me.... - Excel 2007 very slow - change a few values and wait 5 seconds before calculated fields get recalculated - never used to be like that and my old commodore 64 updated faster - Cut + Paste not working as expected in Excel 2007 - cutting and pasting a formula from one cell to another quietly causes the formulas in a load of other unrelated cells to change, incorrectly (so I end up copy+pasting then deleting the values from the original cells instead) - Word 2007 saying that documents are locked for editing by other users, sometimes myself, when they are not. After deleting the temporary lock file thing, then saying that the file is in use by "someone" Also I'm not keen on the way MS introduce this visual styles feature in Windows XP, take advantage of it in Office 2003, then starting in Office 2007 decide to completely ignore the users preferences and use a custom theme that isn't configurable in the same way. Fortunately other than Outlook for mail, Excel for timesheets and Word for viewing the odd document I don't need to use it all that much.

[peterchen]

So I take you don't hate round glowing thingy in the top left corner?

We are a big screwed up dysfunctional psychotic happy family - some more screwed up, others more happy, but everybody's psychotic joint venture definition of CP
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[Gary R Wheeler]

C'mon John, it could be worse. They could bring back Clippy :shudder:. I hate it too; you can't find a damn thing in it. They managed to completely hide the paragraph formatting dialog.

Software Zen: delete this;
Fold With Us![^]

[DaveyM69]

I hate the ribbon bar too - mainly because of the screen space it takes up. Ctrl+F1 hides/unhides it which makes it semi-bearable.

Dave
BTW, in software, hope and pray is not a viable strategy. (Luc Pattyn)
Expect everything to be hard and then enjoy the things that come easy. (code-frog)

[Rob Graham]

John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:

I hate the ribbon bar

I minimize it to get back most of the space they stole, and so I don't have to look at it. Now if they only had a "lose the jewel" setting...

[Tom Delany]

Shog9 wrote:

Any chance they improved significantly in 2007?

What do you think? X|

WE ARE DYSLEXIC OF BORG. Refutance is systile. Your a$$ will be laminated.

[Steve Echols]

That's :cool:

Mark Wallace wrote:

I'll rip 'em to shreds!

With a ribbon, I hope!

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- S 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!

[Steve Echols]

But at least with the previous versions you could find what you wanted right? In previous versions, you just had to dig deeper. In the current versions you have to dig multiple holes. I have a hard time knowing where the hell I am (mainly in the programs, but sometimes in the real world :))

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- S 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!

[blackjack2150]

Mark Wallace wrote:

I bought a new machine, which had the full, registered, version of Office 2007 pro installed. [...] I now have an illegal version of Office 2003 on that machine.

AFAIK, there was a MS utility which allowed you to use the classic interface (menus) in Office 2007. Not free, but cheap I think.

[blackjack2150]

John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:

I hate the ribbon bar.

But you have to admit that at least the 'live preview' of changes is useful and maybe even cool.

[walvdlz]

John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:

[EDIT] They just revirginized my system here at work, and they gave me Orifice 2007. I hate it.

Maybe here's[^] a solution for you?

Mvg, André Laan I used to laugh at Dilbert cartoons, now I often confuse it with reality. -- Xiangyang Liu --

[Roger Wright]

We just had Office 2007 foisted on us at the office. There's just so much to hate, I don't know where to begin. At least we're not being overworked anymore. No one can get anything useful done with the new Office...

"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"

[Jorgen Sigvardsson]

Steve Echols wrote:

but sometimes in the real world

For that you need Google Maps! ;)

[gri]

Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote:

I'm the opposite. I actually love it. I hated personalized menus and always used to find the menus unfriendly. Now I see everything.

I don't like Office 2007 and I also did not like the personalized menu's ... this was the first thing I turned off after installing office! :)

[Ed Poore]

I don't care since I find Office 2007 more productive and more intuitive. Perhaps if I used Office more I wouldn't have made the change quite so easily but things are logically laid out and since I only do "basic" stuff then everything is where it should be. Plus there are some new features (new formulae in Excel for example) which are really really useful.

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I doubt it. If it isn't intuitive then we need to fix it. - Chris Maunder

[Ed Poore]

Get a bigger monitor ;P

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I doubt it. If it isn't intuitive then we need to fix it. - Chris Maunder

[Gary Wheeler]

The fact that you know who he is, well...

Software Zen: delete this;

[Gary Wheeler]

At least in earlier versions of Office, the functionality was still there. In Office 2007, the following functionality has been removed or rendered so difficult to find it's unavailable: - Paragraph formatting. I've spent dozens of clicks trying to find something that just incidentally leads to the paragraph formatting dialog. As it is, what pops up is missing half the tabs of the original. - Table join. Office 2007 'splits' single tables into two adjacent ones on its own for some reason. The command to join adjacent tables is missing. - Document properties. I have yet to find an installation of Office 2007 that displays the document properties panel correctly. - Update field codes. I use a number of templates, all of which use field codes for document properties in the headers and footers. Office 2003 would automatically update these values whenever you created a new document using the template. Office 2007 doesn't have the functionality at all.

Software Zen: delete this;