Why "Upgrade" To Office 2007 598
walterbyrd writes "IMO: Office-2007 is a contender for the least useful upgrade in the history of computing. It's expensive, has a steep learning curve, and it's default format is even less compatible with anything else. Stan Beer discusses the "upgrade" in his article: Question: why do I need to upgrade to Office 2007?."
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
b) Because muppets keep sending you files in a new, super incompatible format that you can't open otherwise
well... if you're gonna switch, why not (Score:3, Insightful)
as in ? (Score:4, Insightful)
FTA: While I have the utmost respect for Mr Mossberg, I can't help but feel that the words in the second paragraph contradict and negate the words of the first. To my mind, a logical layout of commands and functions would obviate the need to learn how to find those commands and functions.
While I have the utmost respect for Mr. Beer, I can't help but feel that he has laid out an impossibly high standard for software menus. Is it even possible to, as he puts it, "obviate the need to learn how to find those commands and functions?"
Take what I said with a grain of salt, I'm bitter 'cause wish I had a kewl last name like his. Cue the "free-as-in-beer jokes." In 3, 2, 1...
This story is dumb! (Score:5, Insightful)
These arguments are EXACTLY the arguments used with every major innovation in the past.
DOS vs Windows anyone?
I want my 1 minute back (Score:2, Insightful)
Meanwhile, Office 2007 would probably be mandatory for new functionality in new products from Microsoft - just as Office 2003 is mandatory for some functionality (edit in dataview) for Sharepoint Server 2003
From the article (Score:2, Insightful)
A better question would be 'whether some of the time taken to master Office 2007 would be better used to gain a knowledge of OpenOffice, reducing our need to jump every time Microsoft releases a new version of office'.
I Maintain That I Don't NEED It (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft isn't holding a gun to your head. You don't have a need for a ribbon. You may find out later that it increases your productivity and then you may learn that it provides a better solution for your problems. But if you're accomplishing your job and tasks with older copies of Office, why do you need 2007? The fact is you probably don't. I myself am quite successful with OpenOffice.org but I don't use the spreadsheet much if at all.
Hell, as long as Microsoft keeps supporting the copy of Office you use, who cares about 2007? Let the early adopters play around with it and work the bugs out. I'll use the ribbon when everyone else is--no reason for me to learn another "J++" Microsoft product only to have that skill be completely useless. Office 2007 will probably be the de facto standard but why pay the price and risk of an early adopter?
We're all intelligent people here (I think), and we're all capable of weighing the pros and cons of software. Office 2007 should be no different. If you want to present a good article to me on 2007, I'd like to see all sides of the issue, not just telling me why I need to use it.
Shooting themselves in the foot (Score:2, Insightful)
The banner might be more attractive to true first-time users, but will pose a whole new learning hurdle for rare users and much more for users with simple requirements (80+% of all users). The tasks have moved and now are much less obvious.
MS has shot themselves in the foot again. I don't know whether they hit an artery.
Re:This story is dumb! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Shooting themselves in the foot (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, you initially have to take time to figure out where things are, but when you know it's quicker.
I might like to mention something else about all this bitching about "users having to learn a new interface" for Office 2007: Can I not use that same argument for not switching to Linux?
I'd argue the opposite (Score:5, Insightful)
It's sad that MS is slagged of for not changing Office much over the years, then why they finally do innovate, and change it to improve productivity and usefulness people slag it off with "Booohooo it has a steep learning curve". Honestly, Microsoft may do a lot of things wrong, but they do also do something right (i.e. the XBox 360, Visual Studio etc.), I honestly think Office 2007 is one of those things they've done right.
Short canned answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Good question (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Shooting themselves in the foot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:well... if you're gonna switch, why not (Score:3, Insightful)
It's really no different than the previous upgrade (Score:2, Insightful)
But Microsoft never fails to make the new Office write files, by default, that the old Office can't read. Eventually, one grows fatigued with having to send a reply to every email asking that the sender "save the document in Word 2003, please, so I can open it."
This is the way MS has sold each and every one of its upgrades. It's a tried-and-true strategy for them and they've made billions from it. Why would anyone expect them to change at this juncture?
Speaking of menus... (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever menus look like, they need to be consistent. Menus that change every time you look at them suck.
Re:I've already upgraded.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Funny how you are so keen on a feature that MS has been marketing heavilly and that most real users do not care about.
What exactly do you mean by "ties up our services"?
Re:I've already upgraded.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me see if I can translate that:
My business just loves the new features, but I'm not going to tell you which new features we love, and why we love them! Nyah nyah!
And you got modded +5 Insightful... Amazing...
Re:More rows in excel (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'd argue the opposite (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I've already upgraded.. (Score:4, Insightful)
My point is, i've explained myself MILLIONS of times to the slashdot crowd and they always point out how those features are useless, misleading or done in other products but they forget the simple fact that Software is a Solution and as long as it solves your needs, fits your budget and is easy to use & integrate then it doesn't matter what other people think.
Too many times i get drilled down for all the wrong reasons, so if you can't find whats right with something on your own then what *I* say won't make any difference to you.
Not my fault this place is stacked with ignorant users.
For a list of features:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_200
As for streamlining our business, we use Microsoft CRM and our smaller offices uses Accounting 2007 Pro and tying everything together through Office 2k7 is easy as 1-2-3. We use services in Windows 2003, Windows Longhorne Server, SharePoint, Jboss Portal, and Jahia app server to tie things together, share files and publish services/data to our clients and extranet/intranet portals.
Users love it, thats all that we needed. Upgrade was a breeze and included as part of our services.
The reason to upgrade is simple and unavoidable (Score:5, Insightful)
Thus the only way you can work with other people's word documents is to own word. anything else as the parent points out is a waste of valuable time. the cost of word is negligible compared to your time
Re:This story is dumb! (Score:5, Insightful)
You're absolutely right. WP for DOS let you do all of those things, but let you keep control of them, and made it easy to produce coherent documents, with logical mark-up, in a user interface that didn't fight you every step of the way. (I was actually do most of my word-processing work in WP for VMS at the time, which was equally versatile.)
Word encourages you to apply effects willy-nilly, while at the same time making it really hard to apply styles properly, or see exactly what tags are applied to what elements, and in which order. (Does changing *this* change the definition of a style? Create a new style? Reformat this particular element in the style with custom local changes? Most of the time, it's anyone's guess.)
What you end up with is a document that can possibly be tweaked to look flashy, but probably unprofessional, by one person, on one PC / printer combination, for a given revision. Make changes, make changes on another machine, or (heaven forbid) let someone else make changes, and what you'll end up with is a document that quickly descends into a mess of semi-random style, formatting, language, spell-checking and other tags, with little to no hope of regaining any logical structure.
Re:well... if you're gonna switch, why not (Score:5, Insightful)
If switching does save $500, that money can obviously be used elsewhere, but OOo is going to have to be very good to convince people that are satisfied with MS Office to switch. I am not going to speculate about how many people are actually satisfied with office.
Re:As an employer? (Score:2, Insightful)
Clutter! (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this even newsworthy? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I've already upgraded.. (Score:3, Insightful)
If I upgraded today I'd be putting a mostly untested, untried, totally unproven product into production on every system in my enterprise. If I did that, the only thing I would be 'ignoring' is the voice of my own experience... ANd that voice is screaming at me not to trust a 1.0 of anything, least of all from Microsoft.
Feel free to jump first into Office 2007... It is "early adopters" who miss some crucial detail (or who get hammered with an enterprise-wide shutdown when the first zero-day bug is successfully exploited by virus and worm writers) who make my job simpler... Who, in the long run, pay my bills through huge emergency consulting fees, and make my arguments for security that much easier to make.
Again, we've got a huge installed base of Office 2003 users who are doing great--why would I disrupt their productivity for one or two minor improvements? Nobody in my enterprise is doing spreadsheets large enough to trigger the bug described in this thread... With that exception, what "Feature" is missing from Office 2003 that I need so desperately... I don't see it yet, and probably the only reason we (eventually) do it is to "keep up with the Joneses"--but that's not for another year or more.
As for Vista? I'm hoping to ride out Windows XP until we can move the desktops away from Windows entirely. We'll see if I get my wish or not...
Re:And that's one of the features. (Score:1, Insightful)
Yup, and soon the same idiot Lunix fanboys who tell people that missing features in Open Office are a non-issue because "Yuo have teh suorce code so write it yuorself!" will be complaining that no one could POSSIBLY ever figure out how to turn off a Office feature two menus deep, like they do with bulletting or auto-correct.
As for you, goober -- I realize you've never had to make a spreadsheet bigger than "Case: $48.95, Motherboard: $89.95, ..." but some of us grownups use computers to do real computing.
Re:as in ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:well... if you're gonna switch, why not (Score:5, Insightful)
In terms of applications needed by the business, we could pretty much switch 90 per cent of our staff tommorrow. The reason I would never suggest this is that it would not be cost effective. The whole IT infrastructure of the company is set up around supporting Windows. Switching over is not just case of burnig a few Ubuntu ISOs and showing some managers how to use Evolution. We would have to extensivly retrain our IT staff, find a hardware vendor who supported Linux (which might well be somewhat more expensive), and that's before we even begin to get into the day to day hassle of dealing with all the little problems it would throw up.
Case in point, I was setting up a laptop with a GPRS card on one of our salesmens laptop last week, and it wasn't working. After coming to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong at this end, I called the service providers support line. The friendly phone drone on the other end ran through a series of troubleshooting steps over the phone before coming to the same conclusion I had, and then discovering that the reason it wasn't working was because they had not turned the account on.
Now, suppose that was a linux laptop. For arguments sake, lets assume the card actually runs under Linux. Here is how the conversation might well have panned out:
Phone Drone: Click on the start menu...
Me: This machine is running Linux.
PD: Ah, right, I just need to put you hold for a second.
(Hold music)
PD: Sorry, we don't support Linux, you'll need to install this on a windows PC.
Yes, I expect that with much wrangling and arguing I could still make him go and check things their end, but we make calls like this every day. We would have to go through that every time. And no, we would not just be able to choose service providers who support Linux. In the example cited above, we have a choice of four networks for GPRs cards. To my knowledge, none of them support Linux.
There is no doubt that moving to OO.o would remove "an important part of the need to keep the Windows platform ". Unfortunatly, there are dozens more very good reasons why companies keep the Windows platform.
Re:as in ? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Features" or functions (Score:3, Insightful)
BTW - the differences in the interface between 2002 an 2003 are almost completely for the sake of upgrading and eye candy alone. Except for the annoying default that checks help ONLINE which is really a huge pain the ass.
I submit that MS spends little time actually bothering to find out what people what, and how they use it and they instead assume that whatever they like must be what we would naturally prefer too. OO is no better either since it follows MS's lead.
Having said that, I can appreciate you folks who have to use spreadsheets to run your business and you might actually have a real need to use some of those high end obscure functions. Me? No. And no thanks. I think it's a shame that you have to run business functions in a glorified spreadsheet and wordprocessor though or that we have an 'Office Suite' that attempts to compose memos and keep the books and make toast and service the wife, etc....maybe that's the approach that's wrong. My wife runs our rental properties and budgets with a spreadsheet and no matter what I tell her about something basic like MS Money she won't use it. And please make no mistake she knows jack shit about Excel and can't use it beyond typing anyway.
Anyway the problem with MS Office is that it's arbitrary. If the new version is still arbitrary then it's shit. If it's new kinds of arbitrary then it's shit. Either make my life easier or go away. I do not need to learn new workarounds.
Re:well... if you're gonna switch, why not (Score:3, Insightful)
If you depend of excel macros (a really great feature) you're completely out of luck. And there isn't a good OO equivalent to PPT...once you've bought PPT, the whole suite isn't much more.
OO is find for internal use or writing a letter to mon, but not acceptable in consultanting or other business that earn their living selling words or ideas.
Re:Speaking of menus... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This story is dumb! (Score:2, Insightful)
Word is not a word processor, despite it's name. LyX is a word processor. WP used to be. Ok, Word 5.0 FOR DOS (that was 1993 or so) also used to be.
What Word actually is is some kind of cross-breed between a word processor, a cheap DTP program, a text and HTML editor, some kind of weird generic office productivity thing and a dozen shiny, colourful things you don't really want to know what they really are. It's got every feature that has a remote relationship to something that once met the older brother of the father of a word processing feature on the subway crammed into it.
And it still can't do proper justification. For all the crap that's been shoven into it, it still can't handle the very basics of producing a good text document. You can probably code a game in Word, but you can't produce a professional text document.
So whatever it is, it's not a word processor.
What's wrong with "it's default format"? (Score:3, Insightful)
All I really want to know is how unobtrusive it can be. Word 2003 seems congenitally incapable of letting me write an entire sentence without doing something to distract me from the thought I'm trying to express. And you have to go all over the place to turn all that crap off. "Ooh! That looks like an e-mail address! Let's have a deep conversation with Outlook then make a hyperlink!" "Ooh! That file server called monday has a name just like a day of the week! Let's capitalize that word!" "Ooh! Someone you never met who worked here a few years ago wrote something with those three words in the title. Let's put some tiny dots underneath!" STFU and let me type.
Re:I've already upgraded.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Software is a Solution and as long as it solves your needs, fits your budget and is easy to use & integrate then it doesn't matter what other people think.
I find this a very interesting statement coming from someone who represents themself as a businessman.
The successful businesspersons I know are always very concerned about what two groups of people are thinking: their customers and their competitors. That is in the front of their minds whenever they are addressing a group that might hold either a customer or a competitor, even slashdot. But you appear to be too independent a thinker to worry about those outsiders. By buying now into MS Office 2007 (and I presume Vista in all its glory), you are willing to pioneer new approaches to business data flows.
That means taking your eye off the ball for a moment while you budget in the added costs of software, hardware, and arrange for installations and staff training. And you can bet you will be distracted a few more times when you find that the training has to be modified to fit unexpected aspects of usage, new procedures need to be set up to take advantage of the new capabilities, and those new procedures have to be shaken down before they work right.
Meanwhile, some of your competitors are planning to stick with their old systems for a while. The money and effort they are NOT putting into an upgrade process is available for other things— such as a concerted effort to target your customer base. They can and will promise demonstrated performance in critical areas of customer satisfaction where, for the moment, all you can offer is blue sky promises of being able to do better than you used to do. The money you are spending on your upgrade they can and will spend on new customer incentive programs. They can and will say that they are watching your experiment very closely, and will make a similar change if it looks like it will work out for you.
If you are the first in your industry to take on an expensive and unproven upgrade, your customer base will shrink; your revenues will be depressed; and your immediate expenses will clearly be higher. Unless it is sliding toward bankruptcy and needs a miracle, it is always better to be the second business in the industry to do the upgrade dance. Wait until someone else has blazed the trail; pick up his ex customers while he's busy planning his route and building bridges, learn from his experiences and avoid his mistakes.
A quote borrowed from Jeff Duntemann is appropriate: It's the pioneers who catch the arrows.
TCO (Score:3, Insightful)
This is in fact the major argument against upgrading to GNU/Linux. Retraining put the TCO above the already known Microsoft software.
The fun thing is that same the argument doesn't apply when switching to a different version of the Microsoft software, even if the UI change is larger.
Steep learning curve? (Score:1, Insightful)
Almost the entire corporate world uses MS Word. So how does an upgrade to 2007 bring a "steep learning curve"? O2007 isn't all that different, aside from some GUI changes. And I'll bet they can be disabled back to a 'classic' view, just like Vista can.
Sadly, once again, the Slashdot community is on the wrong side of progress. I guess that's why their darlings, Lunix and Open Office, will always be chasing MS's tail lights.
Re:And that's one of the features. (Score:3, Insightful)
The ribbons are new, and can be frustrating at times, but as I've already been through DOS, DR-DOS and its pseudo-windows, WordStar, Multimate, LetterPerfect for DOS, WordPerfect for DOS, WordPerfect for Windows, and every incarnation of MS Word since Word 2, I guess I'll take it in my stride, just like I have the previous ones.
I'm over 60, and still am surprised how "stick in the mud" a lot of people a fraction of my age appear to be when it comes to changing what they are familiar with for something newer.
"It was good enough for Grandpa, so it's good enough for me!" is such a retro reaction to change that I'll never understand it.
Good for you. (Score:1, Insightful)
Why?
What we have works fine.
In a successful corporation with thousends of workes doing nothing seems to be the best course of action in many instances.