If you double-click one of the tabs, it collapses down into just the tab headings, with the ribbon only appearing when you click one - still not ideal though.
Why isn’t it ideal? Doesn’t it take away exactly what the people who put a premium on screen space want taken away?
I just removed the ribbon and the ruler. I’ve now got just the tab bar and a clean sheet of paper. Doesn’t that solve the problem of screen space?
By the way, did you guys know you can get rid of everything but the white sheet of paper by hitting alt-v followed by u? Escape to get out of that mode.
It solves that one problem, but is still not as convenient as a menu bar, which can be navigated by hovering after the initial click - the ribbon requires additional clicks to change tabs and additional clicks for the fly-out submenus.
The only thing–though it’s a big thing–that I don’t like about the ribbon is that you have to program it in a different language than all the other UI controls. It’s written in XML, while the other UI controls like pop-ups are still written in VBA. Now that is rantworthy…at least it would be if XML was more complicated of a language.
Got it. Different strokes I guess… I’ve always hated hover-y menus. They feel “slippery” to me for lack of a better word. I like having to click, it makes the interface feel more clear and explicit.
I do wonder why they don’t just have options for different styles of GUI.
The vast majority of people using it are repeat users and it doesn’t take just a few minutes to learn the differences. If it didn’t, people wouldn’t be bitching about it.
Upgrading new format functions is a different issue than rearranging an established layout used by millions of office workers. Note the word OFFICE in their promotion of the product.
that is simply not true.
I have 97 and 2007. The 2007 ribbon system is a visual space hog and is no easier to use than 97. It’s just different. It’s one thing to regroup Headers/Footers under formatting but it’s another thing to completely destroy the familiarity of a product with an upgrade.
I find the Macro function harder to use (although it has nice features) and I’ve also found a bug in the program. I tried creating a new button which worked fine but when I did the same thing with key-board control it recorded the wrong key strokes. I tried this repeatedly and it is flat out didn’t record correctly. I ended up pasting the coding from a macro created with a button.
I much prefer the ability to open and move various groups of buttons as needed such as the drawing group. It is exponentially easier to have it open while other groups of functions are open. For the space the 2007 ribbon takes up I could load every button in 97. It is NOT a better system even though it does have better functions.
There is no reason to screw with something that works beyond adding new functions. For every dollar businesses spent to gain new features they probably lost ten in lost productivity while employees learned to walk again.
I like the new functions in 2007 but the ribbon system was not a productive change.
Oh yeah, that’s the other reason why changing the ribbon coding from VBA to XML was a hassle. The “Record Macro” functionality was significantly affected by that change.
I remember MS touting how much the new Office suite looked cool like Vista. I LOLed. I’m betting Bill brought us the new Office suite so he can tout a return to the “classic” look in 2 more years with release of Office 10001 (or whatever).
Could you expand on this. Was the macro language changed? I rely on the self generating writer but I see a time when i’ll have to write them directly.
I actually really like the new Office, and I was a whiz kid at the old one. Sure, there’s a learning curve, but I figure it keeps my mind fresh.
Hahahahahaha!!! ZipperJJ, what a funny joke you cracked!!
Lots of people are still encountering Office 2007 for the first time. Here where I work, we’re still running the Office 2000 suite, but we’re about to make the transition to Office 2007. It will be new to the vast majority of us. The fact that it’s been around for a couple of years is really irrelevant; it’s been somewhere else for all that time.
Maybe the takeaway here should be that a lot of businesses have been very leery of converting to Office 2007 from earlier Office suites, and that they may have good reasons for that.
Here, we’re also still using XP as our OS, which has enabled us to miss the entire Vista experience. I’m assuming we’ll go straight to Windows 7 in a bit.
My newest copy of Excel: Excel 2004 (ver. 11.5.1)
My newest copy of Word: hmm hang on (::launches Windows 95 emulator) … Word 97 for Windows. (I don’t have a copy at all in my native OS environment. I think I have Word 4.0 that I can run in vMac under System 6 if need be)
My newest copy of Outlook: that one seems to come with the Windows OS. Outlook Express 6, part of XP (another emulator environment).
I don’t think I own a single solitary copy of PowerPoint.
ERGO: while I sympathize totally with those who work in corporate environments of an inflexible nature, where the new Office is being imposed on you, the rest of you are not exploring your options. I, too, have to interact with the rest of the (Office-using) world.
As others have said, OpenOffice (or NeoOffice/J as an additional option in the Mac universe) lets you open most Office documents if your preferred word processor or spreadsheet etc cannot do so natively.
In addition, there are some good translation software packages out there. The venerable DataViz is still pumping out their Conversions Plus (for Windows) and MacLink Plus (for Mac folk) and they can convert a .docx or .xlsx to the older format about 20 times faster than OpenOffice can. And can convert .doc or .docx to NON MSWord format (the word processor of your choice) with damn good accuracy. Likewise for Excel workbook documents: my GF, a Lotus 123 user who detests Excel, converts to and from Excel <——> 123 using Conversions Plus.
If you hate the current Office, then don’t USE it.
I feel your pain, lissener. I’ve been using Microsoft Office since Word was in beta test (1983, if memory serves), and struggling to do anything in the new version on my wife’s Windows machine makes me very, very happy I use MS-Office on a Mac.
[moderating]
Since the OP doesn’t really pose a question, per se, I’ve moved the thread from GQ to MPSIMS. I’ll feel your pain over here.
[/moderating]
See, that’s the thing. Can someone point out any actual improvements?
I haven’t worked a job where I did PPT for 40 hours a week for almost 10 years, so I’m rusty anyway. But this job I just spent the last four 16-hour days in hell on (my friend’s a web marketing consultant and he promised a delivery that in retrospect he shouldn’t have, and I helped him make his deadline) sent me pretty deeply into PowerPoint and Excel. And Word, come to think of it. The job was five 60-slide presentations created with a Word document as a guide, and a HUUUUUUGE Excel doc as a data source.
Now, one of the things that made me really mad–and again, it’s been 10 years, so I don’t know if this is just the newest version, or happened somewhere along the way–is that PPT no longer has a native graph utility.
Used to be, I would go to Excel, copy the data, and paste it into the PPT graphing software. The graph/chart was then formatable, sizeable, etc., entirely in PPT. This made it possible to have very strict format rules, which can be a lifesaver when you’re trading pages from one doc to another; format rules keep them consistent. You could format font, line size, etc., and have everything match up. Now, there’s no longer graphing software native to PPT: when you insert a chart, Excel pops open, and all you can do is create the chart in Excel, and then you have a linked (I hate linked) graph on the PPT page. This creates a couple of major problems: as far as I was able to determine, you can’t customize a master color palette in Excel the way you can in PPT. And I certainly never found a way that you can import that palette from one to the other. This means that whenever you drop a chart into PPT from Excel, you have to go in and manually recolor all the elements to fit the format.
Also, for some reason, you can’t arrow-key-nudge a chart’s position. When you have it selected, the arrow keys only scroll you through selections of components within the chart. This means you have to move it with the cursor, only. And the outer edge of the imbedded chart element is outside the actual outer edge of the actual chart proper. Ditto resizing. This means that you can’t resize them consistently; every chart that has to be resized has to be resized manually. this means that as you move from slide to slide, the size and placement of a series of charts varies.
I was not able to find a way around this.
My biggest problem though is this whole ribbon thing seems a fundamental change with very little–if any–benefit. I didn’t take time to customize my toolbars, which I’ve always done, so I spent a great deal of time digging around for things that used to be right out on top. (Align and distribute, for example. Find THOSE in under a minute the first time you need them.)
I thought the whole purpose of PPT is that it was so simple anyone can use it? Now it’s a frikkin CAD program, menus within menus within menus. Complexity for its own sake.
I spent the whole time I was working on this monster wondering what the people working in the design department where I worked 10 years ago, doing PPT 40 hours a week for a staff of 1,500 consultants. When I worked there we always HAD to use the most recent version of Office, whether we liked it or not, because inevitably the consultants from whose laptops these presentations would be delivered would probably have the latest version. So I wonder what kind of uproar there was, when the entire staff of designers had to go back to square one and relearn PPT from the ground up.
After carefully reading all of the posts in this thread, I fail to see how this is ultimately to my benefit. After darned near 30 years of using Microsoft Office, I know where stuff is. I generally don’t customize much because I use so many different computers (including other people’s computers), but I use many of the advanced features: index/TOC generation, spreadsheet macros, annotations, and so forth. I’ve formatted everything from flyers to 400-page technical books loaded with tables, charts, and background page images.
And now it’s all different. My productivity on the new version is right down the toilet.
I didn’t complain when new revisions came out for Photoshop, InDesign, Firefox, iTunes, or a dozen other programs I use regularly, because (a) they added significant useful new features, and (b) if I didn’t like a new feature, I could ignore it and it had no impact on my productivity.
Microsoft just changed the interface, invalidating decades of learning their software, without providing any substantive advantage at all.
I haven’t looked at the new version of PPT but the older versions were monkey-stupid easy to use. You could open it and just start using it. If this has changed I will be most unhappy.
I’ll try to expand on this…I am just learning all of this myself, having only learned VBA and XML in the past two months, and having rolled out my first real project only last week.
OK, well…in the old days (two months ago), I was under the impression that when you recorded a macro in Excel or other Office application, Office recorded the language that was used to run that application. So, if you had a pivot table called “Pivot Table1” and you wanted to show only records from country “Canada”, you could do that and get something like
(Of course if you’re a VBA programmer you would probably rather do something like
if you wanted the macro to work correctly under all circumstances, for instance if you added more countries to the “Country code” pivot field.)
Now, with a bit more under my belt, I realize that “Record macro” only shows you the relevant VBA code for each application. It’s a not-insignificant issue. There are a handful of procedures that Office does with some level of automation that don’t show up in “Record macro”. But the biggest thing, obviously, is that if Office runs a procedure in another language, it doesn’t show up in the code. Now that so many of the procedures in Office 2007 are run off of the ribbon, and the ribbon is run in XML, the code just doesn’t show up for some procedures at all.
Here’s a good example of this: Set up a pivot table in Excel 2007. Now hit “Record macro” and open up the Field List from the ribbon, and stop recording. If your version of Excel works like mine, you get an empty macro.
Or even if someone could say “it’s because of the introduction of new and important features X.Y and Z, which just don’t work well with menus, but are extra-specially good when accessed via ribbons”, I think I’d be mollified at least.
Instead, all we seem to have is people basically insisting that if you use it, you’ll get accustomed to it and if you still don’t like it after using it, that’s your fault.
And even saying that if you can’t change the habits of the other people in your workforce, then it’s your fault for not being able to hire people whose productivity is magically not reduced by moving to a technology that takes getting used to, and at the same wage as those who are disrupted, at that.
I was annoyed with it for about half an hour. Then I learned it. It was easy. Suck it up.