I hatehatehate any of the Office products. The only thing I like is the little kitty Assistant. If they had it in Word Perfect I’d love it even more.
Feh.
I use OpenOffice at home (does all the same shit, fo’ free) and WordPerfect at work. The only time I have to use Word is when a judge’s office sends us one of the silly “fill-in-the-blank” motions that are apparently one of the latent symptoms of a paperless judiciary…
Okay Grandpa, and we’ll never make you learn how to use the VCR either…
Office 2007 is an exceptional piece of software. Things are arranged in a sensible fashion. It may not exactly mirror the old layout, but page layout things are in the page layout tab, viewing is in the viewing tab, and everything generally works.
Just getting the formatting right is better, I have used it extensively including a lot of the advanced functions like the equation editor and I have yet to have an apoplectic moment of format-induced rage like I have with Office 2003, Open Office, or, god help-me, that piece of shit Google Docs.
Even if I found it to be arranged in a sensible fashion, which I do not, or was eventually able to adapt to the interface, which I’m not even going to waste my time trying, I can’t stand the LOOK of the damn thing. Everything just looks too goddamn flashy and bold. The text is all bold - what is the deal with that? Does anyone actually know?
Microsoft kept getting requests for Office features that were already included in the software but were nested so deep in submenus that no one knew where to look for them without taking a course first. The ribbon puts things in a more intuitive grouping. Of course, if you’re used to the old interface it’s going to be a massive pain in the ass trying to figure out where everything is.
A good review of the new interface and the why behind it:
I agree that that feature is pretty braindead. I guess the developers feel that enough newbs will be like “OMG, it’s typing for me! Sweet!!!” and everybody else will figure out how to turn it off.
Tools > AutoCorrect > Word Completion Tab
Writing for the lolcatz generation. :rolleyes: If I ever teach a writing course, I’m making the little bastids submit their essays in longhand.
The college where I teach has upgraded the student computers to 2007 but not the professors’ computers, so we all still have 2003. But the first time I got a Word 2007 document, Word 2003 prompted me to download an add-on that would allow me to open the document. Took about 10 seconds. However, I guess you can’t expect everyone you send documents to to do this.
You can save 2007 files in 1995-2003 format. You have to go to “Save As” to do it, but it’s oh so helpful in the end. I have to use that because the lab computers on campus all have Office 07 while the staff computers have 03 and I do my work on both of them. Some of the higher ups were rather adamant about keeping the old version on their computers, I understand.
Your college is a wise college. For all of its inherent shiny-ness, Vista is what Satan uses on the workstations on the network in Hell.
I plan to stay away from Office 2007 for as long as I can. I’m a Word power user, and I’ve customized my toolbars extensively. I have everything working the way I need it to. Getting used to a new interface that doesn’t allow for customization is not my idea of a good time.
My workplace is running XP. My post was referring to office 2007, not the operating system.
It allows for extensive and easy customization via the quick-access bar. It can be displayed wherever you like and you can insert any functionality that Word has into it. It comes up as numbers, so if you like keyboard shortcuts, it’s just, “alt-number,” to whatever function you want. Again, when I had to put together documents with tons and tons of equations, this was an enormously powerful and timesaving feature.
My first and only experience with Word 2007 was over the incompatibility of the .docx format with all preceding versions of Word. Our IT department, who upgraded to 2007 without telling us/caring about the incompatibility shares part of the blame, but it’s typical arrogant Microsoft to introduce a new default format that is incompatible with its predecessors. It took 2 hours we didn’t have to figure out what the problem was and to get someone 3 hours away to change their file.
Just another example of why I refuse to install MS products on my home computers.
Except, of course, that they released a free compatibility pack at the same time as Office 2007 that enables all versions back to Office 2000 to read and write to the new formats. So, ignoring the fact that they made it so there shouldn’t be a problem at all: yes, very arrogant.
It’s user-unfriendly to make .docx the default if it requires something else to be downloaded and installed for it to work on other computers.
Besides, it’s not like this would have helped me anyway-- we can’t download and install anything on work computers without IT authorizing it, and they probably wouldn’t have allowed it for this one file.
All I want is Reveal Codes.
It’s got to be somewhere. I think I lost it around 1997. I loved WordPerfect; for all its deranged keystrokes it was just so… look, I still hit Home-Home-UpArrow and expect to get to the top of my document.
Word occasionally thinks I want to do some very strange formatting. It seems thoroughly unable to understand what I’m trying to do when I make a bullet list, for example. You know what? It reminds me of one of those people who not only completes your sentence for you as you’re speaking – completes it incorrectly, too – but goes on with the thought, gives their own input, and gives you the bright look of a particularly smug fourteen-year-old who totally did what you TOLD HER, man!
So I’d like to avoid this by just opening Reveal Codes. But I can’t find it. I can’t search for it. Did it get an UpDated Nicely NewlyRounded Name? Was ‘Reveal Codes’ too arcane?
The story that I was told is that the reveal codes is not in Word because that would make it easy to reverse-engineer the Word file format. I have been told that there exist versions of Word with a Reveal Codes feature, but they aren’t generally available to the public.
But on the other hand, the new file format is a huge change specifically implemented with the goal of making third-party development easier, which is something people have been hammering Microsoft for since forever, and improves things for everyone (including users). If it were a minor format change, I might agree with you; however, the new format is one of the major selling points of the new suite (possibly even bigger than the new UI), and having the software not use it by default would set back its adoption for a long time.
Besides which, you can change the default save format in the options: Excel Options > Save > “Save files in this format”. So: they’ve provided a compatibility patch. They’ve made it so you can just use the old formats anyway. If you want, you can pretend the new formats don’t exist at all, and all it takes is about five clicks. If this is unacceptable, how are any new features supposed to be implemented at all?
Your IT department is so incompetent that they won’t roll out a simple compatibility patch for the most-used productivity suite in the entire world? Then to be honest, you’ve got far more serious problems than file incompatibility. Managing Office transitions is one of the main things corporate IT do, and all the tools were in place to make this one pretty seamless. Again, not Microsoft’s fault if people don’t use them.
Imagine having a paper deadline and needing to change the font every so often.