Uh, wow. The newest version of Office is, like, wow.

[lissener]

Wouldn’t it be awesome if they completely redesigned the wrench and the pencil every couple years? So that *proving *how adaptable you are becomes the main focus of your job?

How can basically rendering users retarded every few years improve productivity? Seems to me that this is clearly the software version of planned obsolescence: you have to plunk down a big chunk of change every few years and buy the latest version just to maintain compatibility with others in your work universe. It’s coercion, plain and simple.

[Ogre]

@lissener

Wouldn’t it be awesome if they completely redesigned the wrench and the pencil every couple years? So that *proving *how adaptable you are becomes the main focus of your job?

How can basically rendering users retarded every few years improve productivity? Seems to me that this is clearly the software version of planned obsolescence: you have to plunk down a big chunk of change every few years and buy the latest version just to maintain compatibility with others in your work universe. It’s coercion, plain and simple.

Oh, boo fucking hoo. It’s really not even THAT much different.

[Duke]

@Ogre

I was annoyed with it for about half an hour. Then I learned it. It was easy. Suck it up.

BS, Ogre. Office 2007 did remove some genuine functionality from 2003. I posit that it would take you a LOT longer than 30 minutes to learn the VBA code that you now have to write to code ribbon-based macros, which could be recorded in 2003 but can no longer can be in 2007.

Even if it is half an hour, that’s a big loss if you multiply it out by thousands of employees. And, honestly, it’s more than half an hour’s work lost to upgrade. If I’m running around programming macros and doing custom ribbons and designing userforms in my sleep and I still can’t remember where things are in Excel 2007, well, I can certainly see how it takes people longer. Cripes, I’m running an Excel power-user workshop at an international conference in a few months and I know I’ll forget where something is during the workshop.

I mean, if you went to your garage tomorrow and your car’s dashboard had been reworked, it would take you a while to remember where stuff was, right? Same deal.

[Magiver]

@Ogre

I was annoyed with it for about half an hour. Then I learned it. It was easy. Suck it up.

duplicate post.

[Magiver]

@Ogre

I was annoyed with it for about half an hour. Then I learned it. It was easy. Suck it up.

I spent an hour trying to figure out why the macro recorder didn’t work. It sucked up my time nicely. Would be nice if it actually, ya know… worked.

Nothing like reinventing the wheel so it comes out like a pizza with a slice missing.

[lissener]

No, a pizza is at least round. It’s more like reinventing the wheel so it comes out like a kangaroo.

[aruvqan]

@mecaenas

The reasons for the changes are:

1. There was no need for a significant number of new features, the office suite already has a massive amount of functionality. Most of the features that were requested already existed in the products. That’s not to say there aren’t new features, rather that wasn’t the focus of Office 2007

2. Microsoft’s customer experience improvement program had been monitoring countless hours from countless users using the Office suite’s functionality to determine how people use the products and popularity and combinations of features

The reason for the design overhaul was to make the Office suites easier to use, for the most popular features to be more accessible and grouping the features used in combination. The idea is that ultimately the massive reorganisation would benefit all users, both old and new.

I know it’s a terrible shock, but once you get used to it, you’ll probably find overall it is easier to use and the new ribbon and features (such as live preview) actually do make it faster and easier to create great looking documents.

And for people who are issued small 15 inch screen laptops, the ribbon takes up valuable real estate on the screen … and if you are working in a spreadsheet instead of word, it is even more purgatorial…

[Magiver]

I’d like to add that 2007 doesn’t like to exist on the same hard drive as 97 because every time I open it, it goes into an initialization process which takes forever.

[CookingWithGas]

@Duke

I posit that it would take you a LOT longer than 30 minutes to learn the VBA code that you now have to write to code ribbon-based macros, which could be recorded in 2003 but can no longer can be in 2007.

Indeed. I have built veritable applications using VBA in Excel that have to be recoded for the ribbon. And I haven’t had time to figure out how to do it yet.

There is some helpful functionality added in 2007. But using toolbars and much less space I could do things with a single click that now take three clicks. That might not sound like much until you multiply it by hundreds. Or thousands. You can customize the one remaining toolbar but it’s a much less powerful interface. And you can’t get rid of ribbon icons that you rarely or never use. The icons are all large and labelled. It would have been better to treat the ribbon like the toolbar in older versions of IE, where you can choose to show small or large icons, and choose whether to display the corresponding text. That alone could shrink up the ribbon to a more tolerable size.

I have found the location of many commands, especially in Excel, to be counterintuitive. There is an “insert” block but that’s not where you go if you want to insert a column or a row, or a worksheet. Those are all different inserts. If you are going to design a block that will be called insert, it should be able to insert anything.

I find the wizard for chart data to be harder to use, because you can see less information at one time and you have to click more times to see what you do want to see.

I did get used to the changes in pivot tables pretty quickly, but I don’t really see any improvement. Rearranging deck chairs.

It might be good for someone who’s seeing Office for the very first time but for the experienced user it seems a step backwards, at least for the user interface.

[Duke]

@CookingWithGas

And you can’t get rid of ribbon icons that you rarely or never use. The icons are all large and labelled. It would have been better to treat the ribbon like the toolbar in older versions of IE, where you can choose to show small or large icons, and choose whether to display the corresponding text.

Well, you can do all of those things, but you have to completely re-write the ribbon. In XML code that looks something like this:

<custom UI=“Custom UI”>
<tabs>
<tab>
<group>
<gallery>
<button id=“Button 1” imageMso=“CalledSomethingThatLooksNothingLikeTheImage” size=“humongous”
label=“Nobody clicks here”
onAction=“MacroNameIForgot” />
</gallery>
</group>
</tab>
</tabs>
</custom UI>

Fun, fun, fun! Oh, and Office 2007 won’t recognize its own editor software extension (.ooxml…gimme a break).

I did get used to the changes in pivot tables pretty quickly, but I don’t really see any improvement. Rearranging deck chairs.

No, this one I disagree with. The conditional formatting interface is very cool. And there are some extensive and useful additions to the VBA commands.

It might be good for someone who’s seeing Office for the very first time but for the experienced user it seems a step backwards, at least for the user interface.

I’m hoping the RibbonX language starts making more sense in 2010. Right now…I mean, come on, you have to learn two languages that don’t talk to each other to build an application? Seriously.

[Clothahump]

@BrandonR

:rolleyes:

You’ve just convinced me that people really are against any form of change, even if it’s ultimately to the user’s benefit.

But that is not to the user’s benefit. It’s change for the sake of change so that M$ can say they “improved” the product. And they didn’t.

[mecaenas]

[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:55, topic:525276”]

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.
[/QUOTE]

Wow, you started using Office a whole 10 years before it was even invented, impressive!

As a general comment for everyone who has mentioned ‘decades of learning’, I think you’re overstating the case a bit too strongly. It doesn’t take decades or even years to learn these programs and furiously and obsessively complusively lovingly memorise the location of the 10% of features you use. Most users use the same 10% and once you use a feature a handful of times, it sticks in your mind and you know where to find it. Yes, in the new interface some stuff has been shuffled around, but give it a week or 2 of frequent use and it will be just as easy as the last version of Office.

I seriously don’t get the obsession with never innovating and keeping everything completely the same forever as if it’s reached perfection and there’s no need to change.

[Mangetout]

@mecaenas

Wow, you started using Office a whole 10 years before it was even invented, impressive!

As a general comment for everyone who has mentioned ‘decades of learning’, I think you’re overstating the case a bit too strongly. It doesn’t take decades or even years to learn these programs and furiously and obsessively complusively lovingly memorise the location of the 10% of features you use. Most users use the same 10% and once you use a feature a handful of times, it sticks in your mind and you know where to find it. Yes, in the new interface some stuff has been shuffled around, but give it a week or 2 of frequent use and it will be just as easy as the last version of Office.

It may become as familiar as the previous version, over time*, but it’s never going to become as easy, because of the design choices MS made with the ribbon interface (for example, requiring additional clicks for each tab and each fly out menu)

*(This has still to happen for me, after more than a year of using it - I still have to hunt around to find stuff, especially if it’s stuff I infrequently use. I guess if every application on the planet had switched to ribbons at the same time, the adjustment, although probably more painful at the time, might have been easier in the long run.)

The biggest deal for me though is not my own comfort in using it, it’s the fact that I have to try to support a bunch of templates, documents and office-based, or office-interfacing applications, some of them that work only with 2007, some that will not work at all with 2007, some of which are provided by third parties - across a group of users that use them in various assortment, and variously do or do not want to upgrade Office.

In many cases, a user requires Office 2007 in order to open one document, but cannot have it because another document they also rely on does not work with 2007 - and these aren’t just simple documents like letters and ordinary spreadsheets, they tend to be templates or documents with active content or some sort of function.

[CookingWithGas]

@mecaenas

I seriously don’t get the obsession with never innovating and keeping everything completely the same forever as if it’s reached perfection and there’s no need to change.

I love innovation. I love change. Going from Word for DOS to Word for Windows was an innovation. Cameras in phones was an innovation. Intermittent windshield wipers was an innovation. But the ribbon is just fixing something that ain’t broke.

[Magiver]

@CookingWithGas

I love innovation. I love change. Going from Word for DOS to Word for Windows was an innovation. Cameras in phones was an innovation. Intermittent windshield wipers was an innovation. But the ribbon is just fixing something that ain’t broke.

That’s it in a nutshell. I love new features. Hell, I get excited with they just fix the old features. I loved the older versions where I could open and close groups of functions as I needed them and rearrange/add buttons as I needed them. 2007 looks like something for the blind with the giant ribbons. At least you can minimize them. thanks for limiting my ability to customize the toolbars to just the Quick Access bar.

[Magiver]

@Duke

No, this one I disagree with. The conditional formatting interface is very cool. And there are some extensive and useful additions to the VBA commands.

While it may be better, I can’t use it and will now have to spend time relearning a very useful tool. They could have added features to the “old” version and I would have been thrilled. Why don’t you just change the language to Latin while you’re at it.

[Duke]

@Magiver

While it may be better, I can’t use it and will now have to spend time relearning a very useful tool. They could have added features to the “old” version and I would have been thrilled. Why don’t you just change the language to Latin while you’re at it.

Eh, it’s not that much of a change to the basic infrastructure of the pivot table. As far as the VBA commands, there are only a handful of commands that were removed, and most of those were fairly useless holdovers anyway…they could have done away with more.

Honestly, the pivot table upgrades in 2007 were IMHO the best changes to the system. And, hey, I’d totally approve of changing the Developer tab language to Latin. Around here only the priests and I know Latin, and I doubt the Fathers are going to be writing any macros.

[Magiver]

@Duke

Eh, it’s not that much of a change to the basic infrastructure of the pivot table. As far as the VBA commands, there are only a handful of commands that were removed, and most of those were fairly useless holdovers anyway…they could have done away with more.

Honestly, the pivot table upgrades in 2007 were IMHO the best changes to the system. And, hey, I’d totally approve of changing the Developer tab language to Latin. Around here only the priests and I know Latin, and I doubt the Fathers are going to be writing any macros.

I was just playing with it some more. All I had for data to test with were dates so I didn’t have it converted properly as data. It’s easier than I thought but I would set it up so you drag something to a row or a column. Seems more intuitive. One thing that I would change is the floating pivot table box. When you drag it off the locked position on the right it’s squished down so only one variable shows under the column or row. I would like it to display all of the information as I drag it down. Maybe there’s a switch for that.

[Duke]

@Magiver

One thing that I would change is the floating pivot table box. When you drag it off the locked position on the right it’s squished down so only one variable shows under the column or row. I would like it to display all of the information as I drag it down. Maybe there’s a switch for that.

I don’t like the pivot table box either…I’m going to have to look and see if there’s a way to change that.

[Happy_Fun_Ball]

I have only had a couple experiences with Word 07 and the ribbon. These experiences have all started with my wife screaming in frustration from the office about how she can’t find anything with the “*#%^ stupid #%#@& version of Microsoft #%#@.” It has not been too hard to help her (I even did a mail merge for her in <5 minutes and I have not done one of those since the 90s), but I agree it is inconvenient to re-learn where everything is and I am not looking forward to the day my company switches over.

All that said, I just wanted to drop in and say that every word processor I have ever used was a step down from Word Perfect 5.1. It was with this processor that the industry reached its zenith, and has been in a slow, gilded, decline ever since. These days, if I have a really important document to create, I will use LaTex.