This program is a piece of shit. The interface is hideous and gaudy, like a cheaply made electronic appliance with cheesy-assed “chrome” plastic finish. I find the stupid tabbed menu system to be a tremendous pain in the ass. After using Word 2003 for years, my muscle-memory and reflexes are totally conditioned to the interface of that program, and this new one has a fucking clumsy, weird, random-assed arrangement of all the options.
The text is straight-up weird looking. It seems more dark and more bold than the old text from '03. The text in that program, default 12-point, looked like the text on this forum. The letters in '07 seem at least twice as thick and dark. I hate the effect of it on my eyes.
So I try to download the free version of Office '03 available on IU’s webpage for IU students, to install it on this computer that I’m typing on right now (in a computer lab at IU.) But I don’t have permission on this machine to install new programs. So I can’t install it, and I’m stuck with Word 07 or Wordpad. I’m using Wordpad, then, because the other program is just too unbearably shitty.
I actually like the new tabbed format. But a bunch of my co-workers have exactly the same problems with it as you do.
One issue that I certainly have is the fact that office 2003 cannot open the files that I save, so if I am sending something off to someone, I have to take that additional step to “save as”. That problem will be solved eventually when everyone converts.
Sorry for the pain. I am certainly hearing the same thing from my co-workers.
I actually like it better than the previous version, but I never was a power user, and hadn’t memorized all the shortcuts and menu locations… I can find things much easier now. I think new users will have no problems, but I can understand why dyed-in-the-wool Word mavens would find it hard to change over.
Well, I’m sure as hell not going to convert. They can put me on the rack, hold me over an open flame, break me on the wheel, but I’m going to keep on using Office 2003 on my home computer, unless they come out with a “Classic” skin for '07 that EXACTLY replicates the interface of the original.
I’m just pissed that I can’t install '03 on this fucking machine.
Try this add-in (I’ve shamelessly lifted the quote from a mailing list post; I have no experience with 2007, but the people in my editorial circles who’ve tried this add-in seem to like it):
That piece of crap? I can’t find anything in it. I’m sticking to good old Office 2000!
No, really. The place I work at isn’t “into” buying upgrades. And what the hell, it works well enough.
They just stuck office 2007 on all computers at my place of employment. As far as I know even all the faculty got it.
I don’t care so much about word, but Exel 07 is a pain in the ass. I can’t find shit on the ribbon and the first week or so I kept having to go to help. Plus there is this weird bug with it… It hides our page tabs sometimes. No amount hiding and unhiding the tabs in options will bring them back. You just have to close and open excel until it functions properly. It can take a while.
Thank god I haven’t had to make a big spreadsheet yet.
Yep. Huge, festering pile of crap. Why in the name of the FSM they decided to completey abandon the interface they’ve used for 15 years is beyond me.
After evaluation, we decided not to upgrade to 2007 because the program required so damn much time to do simple tasks.
In our evaluation, we found two very helpful sites. They show the classic 2003 interface toolbar, and then they show the comparable 2007 menu shortcuts.
Amen. Change for the sake of change. I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to figure out the new interface and have yet to see any advantages. Plus it’s ugly and cluttered. Of course, I’m not a power user – just someone who occasionally has to look at spreadsheets and doesn’t want to piss away a day learning a new interface.
I actually liked it at first, but then I found myself wasting a lot of time trying to figure out where they’d moved the menu commands to accomplish trivial tasks. Much like using Vista, actually.
Previous versions of Word definitely suck, but at least I knew the interface inside and out. Word 2003 is probably fine for brand-new users, but frustrating for dinosaurs like me who now have to unlearn every process, shortcut, and workaround we learned through sweat and toil over the years.
I was hating it too, until today. I had to edit a 2003 document and add a column to a table. The old document was landscape orientation, very narrow margins, lots of text. I figured that adding another column meant I’d need to fiddle with the column widths. But nope – all the columns fit.
I think Word 2007 adjusted the columns for me. :eek:
But I still can’t figure out how to insert page numbers in a new document. I get a dashed line at the bottom of the page with a page number, but typing on that page gets me nothing.
I actually really like it, with the only problems coming when I need to write a paper for a particularly picky professor that specifies font, margins, etc.
With the defaults set to this “colibri” mess, I have to dig through the font styles for the classic 03 defaults, then everything is hunky dory.
Also, I haven’t quite gotten a grip on the alternate menus that go… somewhere when you are working with a specific object. Eh. Give me some time. I figure that it’ll get phased in eventually, and I might as well have a head start on it.
On the other hand, the only way I’ll be converting to Vista is if my current XP box crashes and I no longer have access to a free copy of XP pro through the Academic Alliance.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘typing on that page gets me nothing’? When you insert the page number, you’re looking at the “header and footer” view. Double click above the footer area where the page number is, and it goes back to normal view and you can start typing again.
I wouldn’t hate Office 07 so much if their stupid ribbon tabs matched the old menus. What was in the “File” menu should be in the Home tab, Edit menu = edit tab, and so on down the line. Heck, maybe even a customized ribbon where you can put your most-used tools so you don’t have to play “find the spell-check” for the fiftieth time.
Of course, at this point I’d be glad to have any Office on my home computer. I have to wait until the Great Motherboard/Processor upgrade (which I just found out will also require a new cd-rom and hard drive {accursed IDE/SATA issues I don’t understand}). I’ve been using OpenOffice in the interim. I hate OpenOffice. I hate it with the rage of a thousand steroid addicts. Here’s a brief list of why:
It likes to complete my words for me as I’m typing them. No, I’m not trying to type “nightmares”, I’m typing night.
It is clunky and slow. (Partially due to the aforementioned needed upgrades, but still.)
It likes to complete words as I’m typing them. Very arrogant of it, I say.
It crashes when I try to open a spreadsheet and a word file at the same time.
I really don’t like programs that put words on my page without my permission.
Office 07 would be a blessing right now. I think I can deal with the 1.5 line space default and even learn how to adjust it to 1 line space default, like God intended, as long as it doesn’t complete my words for me.
The one thing I mind the most is the lack of reverse-compatibility with older Office versions. Making it so that half the attachments I receive don’t open on my machine is a giant festering pain in the neck.
I actually like using Word and Powerpoint 2007, but I had to revert back to Excel 2003. There’s this bizzare bug that basically freezes up the software when you try to change the axis length on a scatter plot with a large data set (>1000 points). Now that might not be important to most people, but it affects upwards of 75% of my work! As far as I’m concerned, it makes Excel 2007 entirely unusable to me.
For those of you with issues converting between formats, may I suggest the following free download - MS Office 2007 Compability Pack . It will allow a user with 2003 to open and read 2007 files.
This is why I use OpenOffice. The interface took a little bit of time getting used to but I find it much more user friendly than MS Word in any incarnation.
Yes it was really hard to get used to at first. I’m still learning where everything is.
And the compatibility issue with other version SUCKS. Today, just minutes before a presentation, we couldn’t get a PowerPoint presentation to open since it was created on 2007 and the other computer had an older version.
