My beloved laptop, Calliope the II, has passed to that undiscovered country of which no tale speaks, obliging me to purchase a new one. I put off buying a new one for far too long because, frankly, I don’t believe in being first out of the gate when it comes to new software, so I was hoping against hope to find something in good shape that had Office '03 on it . But Tuesday I finally surrendered to reality and and bought a new laptop, which, of couse, has the new Office on it.
And I hate it, hate it, hate it hate it hate it hate it hate it hate it HATE !!!
The menu bar is fucked up. I hate the goddamn tabs. It takes multiple clicks to do something as simple as verifying that the margins on a document I’m importing is correct. I’ve just spent the last 10 minutes looking for the freaking auto correct option, because of course it made too much fucking sense to put things like that under TOOLS. I am giving serious thought to flying to Redmond, finding the gormless lickspittle in charge of developing this project, and beating him to death with a framing hammer. No, that’s excessive, and we’re not supposed to wish death on people, so I retract that. I’ll just strap him down, prop open his eyelids with gear like they used on Alex in Clockwork Orange, and foricing him to watch the bootleg tape I have of the Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Ann Coulter, and a great dane gangbanging Nancy Grace.
We had it on one computer here at work. That one copy of MS Word created hours of work for everyone before we had our computer guy uninstall the damn thing and put Word 2003 on the computer.
I don’t think that it is a bad program, but if everyone else is using a prior version of Word, then your docs won’t play well with others. You’ll have to save the docs as a Word 2003 doc and you still have the issue that the docs are saved as read-only. All in all a pain in the ass.
No, I’ve been able to get around that thus far. But I stilll hate it, because I don’t see any significant increases in functionality whereas I do see noticeable losses in efficiency. There’s too many damn circumstances in which one must click 4 and 5 times to do a common task that prior versions of Word let you accomplish with 2 or 3 clicks.
I know it. I upgraded not realizing that everything was different and was just seriously confused. I used to TEACH MS Word, so I had it memorized and all was well. I also work as a Medical Transcriptionist, so speed is what makes me money. When I installed the new word, I was just stunned at how freaking long it took me to figure crap out. Completely non-intuitive, no way to make it look like old Word and make the menus the same, nada. I ended up just finding the most common tasks I did like word counts and new document creation and making my own quick menu of them.
Yeah, I love the autocorrect option. Word symbol, Word options (button at the bottom of the page), proofing menu, autocorrect options. Nice and easy!! I found that in NO time! :rolleyes:
Next time I reformat my machine, I’m going to install a prior version. I am so glad I got this version at a discounted price. I hope that in the next version/upgrade they’ll offer a way to keep whatever new features there are but make it look and work like old Word.
I think it’s just other posters we’re not supposed to wish death on. Carry on.
And, yeah, I don’t know what they’re smoking up in Redmond. They did the same thing to the new IE. Remember how you used to be able to do stuff using menus? That was apparently a bug that has been fixed. It’s a huge step back in usability, not just for the particular program, but against the idea that all programs have a similar and familiar layout that you can learn once and use everywhere.
Pity not the dog. Clearly it is an evil canine – the hound of Mordor, if you will – for naught that is pure and noble will suffer tthe approach of the Grace.
I haven’t even seen the latest incarnation of Office, let alone used it, but i’ve read a few reviews that insist that Office is one thing that Microsoft have managed to get right recently.
I read a couple of reviews where even folks who were very critical of Windows Vista had very nice things to say about Office. They found it extremely functional and intuitive, even while conceding that it takes a little bit of time for users of older versions to get used to the changes.
I just want to point out one thing about this: I’ve only heard of one other person who names their laptop. Said person is, IIRC, Alex Lindsay (anyways it’s someone on one of Leo Laporte’s podcasts), and he also gave his laptop a name that began with a “C.” Naturally, I read this and my mind goes: :dubious:
Shit like you’re talking about is why I quit using Mackrelslurp’s products as much as possible (that, and it all costs more than some cars I’ve owned). They’ll get my copy of OpenOffice when they pry it from my cold, dead, fingers.
I would like to thank Microsoft for making the .docx format the default file format in Office 2007. I really enjoyed having to figure out why I couldn’t open a file I very much needed to make a Friday night deadline. Was the file being corrupted as it was emailed? Was the person sending me the file an idiot or a bad typist? Perhaps one of us (or both of us, even) was working with a fucked-up version of Word.
It was quite thrilling when I finally deduced that Microsoft had once again introduced a new standard, and one solitary, trailblazing user was paving our way to enlightenment. The rest of us will catch up someday, and be immeasurably better off for it, I’m sure.
I can understand the frustration for people who primarily use the mouse; I use the keyboard almost exclusively and used Word 2007 for hours without any problems because everything worked exactly as expected. For the few things that I don’t remember the keyboard shortcut for I had to rummage around the new menus and in general they seemed pretty well organized. There have only been a couple of things that I had to resort to the help to find. I did get a big laugh when I pressed ALT to see the accelerator keys and Word put little letter balloons all over the place.
It may be blasphemy but overall I prefer Word and Excel 2007 to earlier versions. I haven’t tried Powerpoint or Outlook yet.
I forced everyone in my office to switch to Excel 2007. It was painful for about 1 month and then we became addicted. The latest version allows me to compress the holy hell out of files (.xlsb mode) and the amount of info I can hold on one page increased greatly with over one million rows instead of the puny 65,000 of Excel 2003.
I also was able to push the graphics up a notch in Powerpoint 2007 and make a presentation look more fluid.
I haven’t touched Word 2007. I fear it since Word 2003 still kicks my ass everytime I light it up.
The IT department at my university is using their summer to switch all of the campus computers over to Office 2007. Mighty will be the wailing and gnashing of teeth come late August when students who have all their work saved as 2003 files come upon this travesty. Great will be the slaying when graduate and doctoral students who have their theses and dissertations saved as Office 2003 files discover they can no longer access them on campus. Long will be the lines at the “Kick the ITCS Department’s Ass” booth I will be setting up in the center of campus.
You can open files created prior to 2007 fine. The trick is when you SAVE a file, if the person that will open it does not have 2007, you have to save that as a prior version. It handles opening stuff seamlessly.
The Routing function, which we used a lot, has been retired by Microsoft because it was “little used” and “to enhance the user experience”.
Uh?
If you didn’t use the function and continue not to use it, how is your user experience enhanced? If you did use it and no longer can, how is your user experience enhanced?
Not to stop bitching, but I’ve been routinely saving new files as 97-2003 Word files; it’s my default now. My problem with the new Office is its god-awful stupid idiotic user interface, which is clearly the work of evil monkeys escaped from Chris Griffin’s closet.
