Microsoft Office 2007. Have you tried it?

I need to update from Office 2000 so my daughters ipod can sync with Outlook. So do I just go to Office 2003 or make the jump to Office 2007?

Office 07 Pro is about $180 for the academic version, which she can get.

The only real negative I know of so far is that if you send a document from Office 2007 to a user of Office 2003 or older they need a converter to open it.

I'm evaluating Open Office (openoffice.org) and that's our shop's next upgrade. We have outlook as a stand alone. Of course we have international customers that are demanding the open document standard that MS doesn't exactly support yet.

I have some friends that aren't that impressed with it. Not much for most users jo justify the upgrade.

Actually, you can save documents in the older format so compatability isn't an issue. We're using it at work w/o any major issues. The interface is quite a bit different through. I don't like Outlook's search though. It sucks. Give me Pine and egrep and I'm a happy, happy man.

- Chris

I've used it and prefer OO, but if you've got to have MS Office why not go for the gold, especially if she can get it with a discount?

Apparently you can get a free 60 day trial. You might want to look at this thread. Those that use it prefer it. Of course the professional nay-sayers say otherwise.
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=212481

I'm sticking with 2003 but I don't use it much. The biggest reason I bought it (at a rediculously high price) is because I got a free digital camera and a free printer with it. The camera is history but that HP 7350 printer is still doing yeoman's service.

My employer (state judiciary) has gone to Open Office (its free), and its very similar to Word. But Dave it probably lacks the syncing and whooptydo stuff that MS Office can do.

cheers

I don't know about that, Noodle. Apple has apparently written things to work with MS software, so it wouldn't surprise me if they had something out there for the open-source crowd..

Im still using 2000/2003 whats new with the newer versions?

Illum_the_nation said:

Im still using 2000/2003 whats new with the newer versions?

Click to expand...

For Word, Excel, and PowerPoint...just looks really:



- Chris

We're switching to it here at work--university campus. we teach the new versions of everything--and most of us are dreading this one.

Two coworkers at a multi-day event to learn about it today. I did not go...

I've ran the trial and the new interface is really crappy. Items that should be similar are several mouse clicks away and the toolbars are so big that even on my high res wide screen it takes too much space. With the industry going to wide screen everything MSOffise2007 is the wrong way, if they wanted a real toolbar revolution they should have put them on the side in the waster space. I switched to open office a couple years ago and couldn't be happier, on my work pc with MSoffice I find so many bugs and issues with it when I try to do anything nearly advanced.

after the transition from 2000 to 01, 02, to 03 I just stopped...whats the point of installing a newer version if the previous version has everything you need for work?

but....tried 06 from school computers...the softwares debugged pretty good, but still...

I beta'd both Vista and Office07 so I have some grasp of the real world problems.

The main reason is that I knew my kids would be using it and wanted to see how much change from XP/03 there was.

Truthfully, I didn't like it. BUT...I found the less familiar you were with XP and old office versions, the easier it seemed to be.

My kids and especially my Mom, who didn't ever really use Office 03 or earlier, had no problems with Office07, while my dad and I seemed to fight it every step of the way. The kids and my mom thought it was no hassle!

I haven't seen the final release versions, but once they got the hang of the "ribbon" menus, they just cruised through stuff.

So maybe there is hope!

Bill

I re-did my laptop recently and put fresh copies of Vista and Office '07 on it. My experiences with both now have led me to this:

Office 2000 to 2007, big change, do it!
Office 2003 to 2007, probably not worth it
XP to Vista (off topic I know... sorry...) Argh!

I tried the 60-day trial of Office 2007, and I really liked it. The really redesigned the whole user interface, and I'd say it's worth going with 2007 over 2003.

I agree. I'm a Winxp/ Office 2003 power user. I hated it. People that spend very little time in the UI seemed to appreciate the change.

bwaites said:

I beta'd both Vista and Office07 so I have some grasp of the real world problems.

The main reason is that I knew my kids would be using it and wanted to see how much change from XP/03 there was.

Truthfully, I didn't like it. BUT...I found the less familiar you were with XP and old office versions, the easier it seemed to be.

My kids and especially my Mom, who didn't ever really use Office 03 or earlier, had no problems with Office07, while my dad and I seemed to fight it every step of the way. The kids and my mom thought it was no hassle!

I haven't seen the final release versions, but once they got the hang of the "ribbon" menus, they just cruised through stuff.

So maybe there is hope!

Bill

Click to expand...

I've used '00/'03 quite often, so when a student blew into my worksite (I work at a junior college) with a brand-spankin'-new laptop and asked me to help reformat and print her highly-messy Word '07 document for her class in five minutes, it was not as easy as I'm used to. They've changed a lot of menus around, so if you're used to the more traditional 2k/XP style, give yourself a while to get used to the new UI.

I heard from somewhere online (wow, that's a real specific, reputable source, right? ) that most of the changes from '03 to '07 were not in features, but in how the features were accessed. Apparently, when MS asked users what they wanted in the new Office software, people requested features that already existed but were hard to find. Based on that, I'd say that if you were already super-cool with an earlier version of Office, you should be fine without '07.

For my funny story about Open Office, see post #15 of this thread.