“different” is the same as “less good”.
Actually, “different” isn’t just “less good”. It is much,much,much less good.
It is bad,bad,bad,bad,bad…
'Cause, you see, people don’t use a micro$oft products because they want to produce .doc files or .xls files.
People produce files because they want to GET PAID for doing USEFUL WORK.
And re-learning how to operate the computer, so that by the end of the day you have produced less than 1 hour of useful work, is NOT a good way to impress your boss.
Only if you are already proficient in the older version, which I readily agree is true for many, many people - perhaps even the majority of potential users of the new version - and Micro$haft need to be castigated here and elsewhere for messing with it. The point I was trying to make was that the newer version is probably not an intrinsically inferior product, and new users may take to it with the same ease (or difficulty ) as previously.
Word 2003 files (.doc extension) work just fine in Word 2007 and you do have the option of saving them as Word 2003 compatible if for example you wanted to work on them on campus with the 2K7 software but only have 2K3 at home.
The new .docx files will not open in Word 2003 that I know of.
What gave you the impression .doc files would suddenly stop working because the suite uses a new default? The old one didn’t go away, it’s just not first choice anymore.
The new interface for Office 2007 is decidedly better than before. Word is still brain-dead when it comes to editing paragraph attributes (a blight that affects OpenOffice as well, sadly), but at least the GUI has improved dramatically. It takes usually 20 to 30 minutes for our users to get well and truly comfortable with the new way of doing things, but people who have made the effort (and even those who had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the upgrade) have all admitted that it is much more effective.
And, for those of us who still do things with the keyboard unconsciously (like, say deleting rows or columns in Excel), the Office 2007 apps detect the “Office 2003 access key” and mimic the earlier versions’ behaviour, albeit with a dialog telling you that it’s doing so.
It’s sad that people are so close-minded as to believe that software should remain static, and that the interface must not change. These are the same people who blind themselves to possibility because of stupid prejudices. Such is life.
But the reality is that most people will never remember to save in the ‘old’ version, or figure out how to set ‘old’ as the default save format. So inboxes will fill with attachments unreadable to existing versions of Office, or which are missing some key graphic or feature that the old format does not support. When this mishap is detected by the recipient ten minutes before deadline time, they will be often be unable to get the originatior to resave and resend because it will be the middle of the night, during a meeting, etc.
Hence much wailing, gnashing of teeth, howls of abuse at the IT department, and soon a flood of sales for 2K7 as people vow never to go through THAT shit again. Just as happened last time they broke backwards compatability (was it 95-97? I forget).
Personally I’ve never even seen 2K7, but all I want is 2K3 with non-shit format handling in Word (seems I’m SOL again), and Excel able to handle a few hundred thousand rows of data, preferably with some control as to whether imported numbers are treated as text or not. Ah well.
Hmm; I haven’t managed to establish whether that’s true or not, but I can’t imagine it’s going to be a particularly common usage in any case. As a test I saved a 2003 document using their free converters, and it came out looking substantially different than the original (the file, that is, not the document output). I can’t see any common file segments on casual inspection, although the .docx is less than half the size so it could well be the result of using compression.
Nonetheless, the point remains that an open XML-based file format has a lot of benefits (OpenOffice has its own equivalent), and that Microsoft has released free tools that make the changeover pretty painless for users of legacy products. It’s hard in this instance to see what else they could’ve done.
They will if you install the free compatibility package I linked to earlier. You also get some of the Cleartype-optimised fonts developed for Vista, some of which are very readable indeed (in particular I’m addicted to Consolas, the fixed-width typeface used for things like Visual Studio).
Skald, while you’re in Redmond, mind looking up the freak who decided to localize shortcuts?
Having ctrl+N for “negrita” (bold) at least makes sense, although it drives me nuts. But why “ctrl+E” for “select all”? The Spanish is “seleccionar todo”!
I currently work Tier 2 in a Help Desk and I swear I cuss more about Microchof than about my customers (whose fault it never is, of course, even when it is, but hey, having to send five emails instead of one means I bill more :p)
Actually, 2007 is much better for students because it will auto-format citations and bibliographies in major styles like APA, MLA, Chicago and even Turabian, and it’s pretty intuitive.
Which is a feature the library may want to emphasize.
And I am with you all the way, Skald, on this new Office interface. It SUCKS. I am so angry that I paid good money for this piece of crap that doesn’t even have the option to use ‘classic’ interface, but instead hides essential items and makes doing the simplest of tasks take five times as long.
The only thing I like about it, so far, is that when you highlight text and use the font dropdown, it actually gives you a preview of how it’ll look. Not exactly high praise.
I hate the new Excel, too, but not as much as Word. Haven’t had any reason to use the rest of Office yet, and can’t work up the enthusiasm to torture myself by checking it without a reason.
Oh, and do not get me started on Expression Web (the successor to Front Page). I can’t even work that damn program out at all.
Where’s the “undo” button? I upgraded after reading a bunch of great reviews in a number of 'puter mags…but I’m finding the learning curve (and I only really need to use Word) maddening – been at it for over two months too. Can’t find half of the stuff that was in plain (commonsensical) view in Office '03!
PS-How do you get to “help” with the mouse? That’s another thing, I’m not into learning keyboard commands, always found using the mouse much easier/intuitive. See something you want, click on it. End of story.
The Help can be reached using the mouse by clicking the circled question mark with the blue background in the upper right just under the X that would close the application.
Undo and Redo are at the very top left just to the right of the diskette icon.
You know, you can change the default file format for saving files, from .docx to word 97-03 format. Office Button>Word Options>Save>Save files in this format
Wait a tick, what’s this? Red Fury in a discussion of software flaws? Wheres the Barcelona dockworker with hands armored in proletariat callous, the tattoos of Lenin and “Cago!”? The 11 am shadow, eyes rimmed with red wine and red revolution: Red Fury!
The Revolution will not be televised… but it will be blogged.
[sub]And what’s a leftie like him doing using the corporate effluvium of Microsoft Office instead of free and honourable People’s Software[sup]TM[/sup] such as Open Office?[/sub]
TY. Think they could have made the icon for Help (?) any smaller? As for ‘undo’ and ‘redo’ couldn’t find them where you said till I realized that’s yet another drop-down menu one needs to customize, whereas before it was right there for all to see. Kinda of playing hide and go seek with their costumers. Yeah, a real ‘improvement’ that. And I’m not even going to get into all the different hieroglyphics that come up each time you hit a key on the menu line, e.g., “home” “references” “mailings”, etc.
As for the “other” two dweebs questioning my rugged proletarian lifestyle, well, don’t. I just happen to be a rugged proletarian pseudo-geek – with a taste for the finer things in life.
) as previously.
