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?."
Graphically Heavy (Score:2, Interesting)
Problems exist mostly for existing 'power' users (Score:5, Interesting)
For those users, the ribbon may be a great help in unlocking the use of the tool.
Of course, the real question is will the PHBs in major corporations see it that way? If they don't adopt Office 2007 in droves, it will die. If they do, then due to file format differences, everyone will be forced to upgrade and this becomes an entirely moot point. *sigh* Which is too bad for those of are using OpenOffice.org and other competing open source products.
As an employer? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm still irritated that the college I work at jumps on every little thing from Microsoft, but still doesn't cover anything recent from the UNIX or Mac worlds.
Here's a reason why you don't... Cleartype! (Score:5, Interesting)
Kick me, I'm stupid..... (Score:4, Interesting)
What about a serious investigation of whether or not the new features will help his organization?
How about a review of their current users, features used/wanted, to find out whether an upgrade would be cost effective and return something for the investment?
Why does every new MS Office release inspire a new round of articles from dopes wanting someone else to tell them what would be good for their business, without much effort on their own behalf?
Anytime I hear or read someone asking whether they should upgrade to the latest version of ANYTHING, I just want to choke them.
By the time a new product comes out, there has been MORE than enough time for due dillegance, and the answer should be apparent before release candidates are distributed, unless of course, you are an idiot, and your company sucks.
When a owner of smooth running Windows shop with dozens of .NET applications and centralized SharePoint askes me about switching to Linux to 'save a few bucks', I immediately do a quick cost/benefit analysis on whether or not I should just beat his ass and change professions.
Because it is much better for technical documents? (Score:3, Interesting)
And the new equation editor simply rocks. It combines the best of TeX, Classic Equation Editor and OpenOffice Writer's equivalent. You can write some TeX code, press the Space key and Word automatically converts it to a WYSIWYG formula, which behaves pretty much like the equations in the Classic version.
Not My Experience (Score:5, Interesting)
I went into the upgrade with high expectations for the ribbon. I had read a lot about it, and honestly it just makes a lot of sense. Commands that are grouped logically and presented contextually, while at the same time not being buried in a menu that few will ever see, simply seems like the right way to do things.
At the same time I realized that I have been using Office for many, many years, and the fairly dramatic UI shift would probably result in some learning curve.
I was, however, pleasantly surprised. For the most part, commands are where they should be. If I want to change the alignment of some text I go to the layout tab. (Or just highlight the text and move my mouse toward the fading in popup thingy.) If I want to insert a picture, surprise surprise, I got to the insert tab. It all makes a lot of sense.
Furthermore, in just the couple of months that I've been using Office 2007, I've discovered a lot of functionality I never new existed. (And, as many of you know, most Office users only use a very small fraction of Office's features.)
Each Office upgrade before 2007 has, for the most part, been an exercise in adding features that few will ever use because they don't know they're there. Office 2007's new UI changes that. For many users, it will be like Microsoft added thousands of new features when, in fact, they've been there all along but were never seen.
Re:I Maintain That I Don't NEED It (Score:5, Interesting)
If you can see some extension that people will want you can capitalize on it, if people will need to be trained you can train them, if it really is a useful innovation you can take advantage of it immediately.
However as you said it is a risk, as is any potentially worthwhile investment, and you have to decide for yourself whether it's worth it.
Re:It's really no different than the previous upgr (Score:3, Interesting)
here that lets you read new office 2007 files in older versions.
Re:The reason to upgrade is simple and unavoidable (Score:4, Interesting)
What would you say if you were one of those who didn't upgrade, for those reasons, and someone sent you an indecipherable document?
If this started happening often, and you felt pressured to buy the overpriced but useless software, would you blame the other users? Or Microsoft? Or "business"?
Re:as in ? (Score:4, Interesting)
First, because he means the curve is shallow, not steep. A steep learning curve means something is easy to learn. If you doubt me, feel free to plot a "material learned/time" graph on the back of an envelope.
More seriously, what he means is that the interface is difficult to use. I've been using Office 2003 for 3 years, and every permutation before that, and I am still cursing the interface as buggy and counterintuitive. I hate contextual menus -- they mean I always have to check to see if the option I want is there, and it usually isn't. Microsoft ripped off that ill-advised Macintosh idea of making the computer "Smarter than the User", and the result is offensive.
Take one example: Every time I encounter an installation of Word that I have to use, the first thing I do is disable everything automatic that I can. But, of course, since I collaborate with folks in several languages, including ones that Word doesn't recognize, inevitably Word will still decide I'm writing in a language I have no intention to write in (e.g., Document was originally created in Austrian German, so every time I insert a footnote, it's in Austrian German). Now it runs automatic language support for that, including all that autoformatting crap that sucks even if I were writing in that language. Better yet, they enable the autoformatting, but require a consultation of a regional install disk to actually control it. So there's no bloody way to turn it off.
Will Office 2007 be better? I don't know, but complaining about the interface being hard to learn doesn't make any sense? Office's interface has never been intuitive or useful -- well, at least since Word 5.1 for the Macintosh (and for the record, I've never liked Apple either).
Re:More rows in excel (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Most people I know who use microsoft office and other microsoft products use them exclusively. I've made some inroads into converting people towards open source, but it's often too much work.
I had to change away from using openoffice and Latex for my documents during my phd because my supervisor insisted everything must be in microsoft formats, as did the department I was in. That was everything from papers to lecture materials. As this was a computer science dept I was somewhat amazed. I was at one point the *only* person there actively encouraging use of open source tools.
This wasn't a place I was happy be to be at, hence why I am no longer there.
Re:More rows in excel (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a former DBA, and one of my favorite activities was getting a dataset out of SQL with "some" processing done on it, and then pasting it right from isqlw (or now, sqlwb) into excel and doing more ad-hoc sorting and aggregate functions on it. You could usually do these things in SQL, but the indexes or partial computation was such that it might have been a 10-60 second query for each ad-hoc scenario you wanted to try.
However, once you had a snapshot of the output, even if it was 100k - 150k rows, excel can go over it faster for a few different data presentation views. (sort this, diff these two columns -- whatever).
Plus, it's not chewing up DB resources.
Excel 2007 is great for SQL db people - im not sure what features are new vs just better, but its really easy to embed sql statements into sheets, have their output show up as a grid of cells, refresh the dataset right from the ribbon, and have a chart defined on the data grid. I cooked up something that sucked the bvt-test result data out of our sql database and gave us pass/fail bargraphs from build to build in just a few minutes. Save the
Re:I will upgrade for ONE reason (Score:3, Interesting)
I cringe whenever I hear some spreadsheet jockey bragging about the size of his spreadsheet... you know it is just chock full of crap data and calculation errors.
It's a shame that you've spent 15 years stuck on spreadsheets. Spend some time to learn a database.
Re:The reason to upgrade is simple and unavoidable (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't interoperability one of the problems that Office 2007 (and the upcoming Office 2008 for Mac) solves by using the Office OpenXML format? It is a open, published standard that anybody can use with no license encumbrance; as a standard, a document on one platform SHOULD be the same on any other platform. Thus, if I should choose to stick with NeoOffice, any document I create in Word and save in OpenXML should be the exact same in NeoOffice (when it supports the format; scheduled for the first quarter of 2007.)
As Office is going to the OpenXML format, there will no longer be a "requirement" as you imply.
(Of course, as has been pointed out, the Office OpenXML standard is 6000+ pages long; I got the PDF document from the ECMA website this morning, and it's 47 MB. What kind of pain and suffering goes into implementing such a standard? Is it really as complex as such a long specification document implies?)
Re:I've already upgraded.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Except you're not running unix/linux/macOS and therefore completely insecure and really stupid for not using my OS. Oh god what a tard for not doing things this way, that way, the other way, blah blah blah.
If it works, it works. Simple as that. It works for me, the UI isn't so bad that you can't learn it, the format can be changed, you can still save as earlier compatible versions with not much issue, so I agree with you - no problem.
Re:Shooting themselves in the foot (Score:3, Interesting)
All GUIs are fundmentally menuing systems. Limitied choice. You can only run whatever has been configured. If you can find it. My $PATH has 2823 possibilities. A very crowded menu system might have 100. Forcing additional layers and complexity. Text meuing systems have the same disadvantage.
GUIs are bloated bugfests. Poor use of hardware. A small example -- I view text 160 cols by 73 rows in crisp textmode fonts. I can't tune an Xterm to more than 132x50 before the fonts become badly interpolated in bitmode.
GUIs abandon that great IT invention of 7000 years ago -- the alphabet! Icons are cryptic pictographs.
GUIs don't permit pgms to co-operate unless they've been rather specifically designed to do so. How do you do a pipe | ? The clipboard is a feeble sustitute, and is available as `gpm` under CLI.
Most GUIs are very poorly implemented, with poor UI choices, bad ergonomics and excessive mouse precision required. In fairness, many CLI are also poorly implemented. MS-Windows COMMAND.COM is horrible, and CMD.EXE is only marginally better.
Please note I'm not picking out any particular GUI. MS-Windows, The X Window System, or Mac OS X are all roughly equally bad.
Re:More rows in excel (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember using it play with some data I'd collected. I didn't really need anything too speciual. I just wanted to be able to produce some graphs of data to see what general shape we were getting.
Obviously, there are better tools for this purpose, but we already had Excel, and it was just about adequate with a little fiddling around. Investigating a better alternative would have taken longer than getting it to work in excel, but with computer generated data, you do end up with a lot of lines.
Re:Good question (Score:3, Interesting)
I knew someone who worked in a medical billing office who had a good reason to upgrade from Word 95 to Word 97. Here is why:
Once per week, she had to download a file from a bank, load it into MS Word, select one number on a line at the bottom of the file, copy, and then paste it into a field in a database application. The file really just contained plain text information.
But despite being text, despite only really containing a single number that the user wanted, the file was in Word 97 format.
When she tried to load the file into MS Word 95, the machine would completely freeze. It didn't display an error message saying it couldn't read the file. It didn't merely cause the word processor to dump. It didn't blue screen. It totally crashed the OS.
She went to another machine that had Word 97 loaded. Word 97 was able to read the file. So she told us, "I need to upgrade to Word 97." We installed Word 97. But it didn't have enough memory to run Word 97. (This is hazy, but I think the Word 97 installer complained, or Word 97 complained when it started, or something like that.) So she needed more RAM.
The motherboard was full. We couldn't add more RAM.
So she had to buy a new computer.
The new computer came with Windows 98 loaded instead of Windows 95.
So, she got a new machine with more RAM, became Yet Another Growing Windows marketshare statistic, bought Word 97, and that solved her problem. Finally, she was able to download a single number from a bank, once per week. And it merely cost the company (and when you get down to it, the patients) a couple thousand dollars.
Re:From the "Butterknife as a Screwdriver" dept. (Score:3, Interesting)
Or I can right-click on it, open it in Excel, figure out what's going on and start writing the SAS import script, Python analysis, database structure or whathaveyou within 10 seconds of getting the file, instead of puzzling over the man page for awk or sed. No one gives you a gold star (or at least no one gives me a gold star) for being too 1337 to use Excel.