Office 2007 Anybody? Anybody?

No help needed - just venting - if you don't care, stop reading here.

Recently installed Office Home and Student 2007 on my wife's new
Christmas Dell Desktop. Actually getting the software delivered was
another adventure - word to the wise - never order anything to be
delivered by the USPS in the month before Christmas. I know, I could
have walked into a B&M store and walked out with a copy, but I paid
less than half price by ordering it through the MS Employee Purchase
Plan, which I qualify for through work.

Anyhoo, the new user interface takes a little getting used to, after a
couple of weeks, we're starting to figure out what tab things are on.
Turns out, if you like your old Office interface, there's a 3rd party
add-on that adds a new custom tab with the old menus on it. Figure
I'll just stick it out and learn the new interface. Should be fun
switching back and forth since I use 2003 at work.

First thing I did was configure all the apps to save in the Office
2003 format instead of that new OOXML semi-standard, since my wife
exchanges a lot of files with colleagues at school, seemed like the
prudent thing to do. So far, so good. But, more on this subject later.

So, she was working on a Powerpoint document, asked me to help her
figure out how to put a hyperlinked website URL in the document.
"Insert" tab seemed like a logical place to look, yep, there it was.
The Hyperlink dialog box was smart enough to be able to access the
browser history, made it real easy to find the address. Great, now
lets click on the hyperlink to check it - nope, doesn't work.

After 20 minutes of messing around trying various things, looking at
Office Help, still no joy. Made my way to the MS support website,
searched on "hyperlink", after about 10 more minutes of poking around
there, found an article stating that Powerpoint 2007 hyperlinks may
not work correctly when the document is saved in the Office 2003
format. Great! The workaround - go to the hyperlink in the document,
right-click, select Open Hyperlink. Great! <sarcasm intended>.

I guess it's the usual thing you expect with new stuff from Microsoft
- lots of broken things.

Oh, and good luck figuring out how to open that new rounded-corner box
- took me 5 minutes - I was _THIS_ far from using a hammer.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading - I feel better now.

Jerry

 

Still getting used to it as well

 

<snip>


Well written post. I'm avoiding both 07 and Vista at this point so long as
I have a choice.


Stew

 

Consider yourself lucky in a very perverse way. You only spent $150 for Office
Home and Student 2007 and you did not get one of the versions with Access, which
breaks many back end data bases. You can imagine how thrilled corporate America
is with this.

I have used OpenOffice on a limited basis only on my road machine, and I have
been able to read and write documents OK between it and this one... Ben Myers

 

Are you saying that OO can deal with Office07 created files?

 

Ben:

I didn't think OO can deal with .docx and similar Office 2007 files. Has
that changed?

Mel

 

I'm not sure. I deals quite well with the older stuff, but I don't have any to
try. Somebody send me a couple. A document and a spreadsheet... Ben Myers

 

Microsoft were kind enough to send me a copy of Office 2007 Pro, and it is
taking a bit of getting used to (finding some options/commands on the ribbon
has really frustrated me at some points), there've been a couple of
surprises (as much as I hate the animated font effects, supporting them but
with no means to edit/create them seems very weird to me), but on the whole
I like it and think it's decent enough. And features that I badly wanted a
while ago have been included, which is nice.

 

Spent less than half that much, got it through the Employee Purchase
Program at work.

Not as good a deal as it used to be though. 5 years ago I was able to
buy Office Pro for $20.

Jerry

 

The 3rd party add-on is definitely worth it. Office 2007's user
interface sucks. Good reason to go with Open Office or stick with
Office 2003.

Some exceptions:

- One Note 2007 is a great app -- I love it.

- Haven't checked it out yet, but in Access there is some kind of
implementation of a multi-valued column. The DBA in me is excited
about that but I don't have any database needs anymore.

Otherwise, MS is royally f*ing up. I wonder if Gates wasn't involved.
Egg on his face if he was.

As someone said, there are chinks in MS's armor. I doubt anyone is
going to capitalize on them.

Apple should seriously consider licensing its OS right now while Vista
is floundering, but that won't happen, unfortunately.