Customer Reviews

Microsoft Office Small Business 2007 UPGRADE [Old Version]

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

My response to Office 2007 is similar to how I feel about Vista. We all grow accustomed over time to using software and operating systems a certain way and when a really significant new version comes along that changes things, it creates some initial discomfort and even frustration. But if you give the new version a real chance, even to the point of actually doing some reading on how to use it, and then apply what you have learned, there is the eventual realization that someone did put a lot of thought into this and it actually does work better. I am coming to this point now with both Vista and Office 2007. Both are worth the upgrade, but only if you are willing to devote the time and energy it takes to really take advantage of what they offer. Office 2007 may seem more difficult at first, but with familiarity you will come to appreciate the advance it actually represents. There is less need for the degree of personal customization of the interface that most of us required for previous versions of Office because of the much more effective system of ribbons, tabs, groups, and galleries developed for Office 2007.

My old computer died last week, so I was forced to buy a new one. I got a VERY good computer - HP tower, with QUAD (not dual) processor, and 3 Gigs of RAM. I have 2 internal drives at 1 terabyte, and 2 externals at 1 TB total. No drive has more than 20% space used, and no other software has been installed.

The biggest problem is IT'S SLOW! When typing an email in Outlook, or a Word document (or Publisher), there is a lag between the time you hit the key and before the character prints. It's like trying to talk with your own echo - I find myself typing MUCH more slowly than I am actually able. I HATE THIS, and I'm not the only one with the problem. Anyone who types for a living has the same complaint. I've turned off all the Outlook and Word 'add-ins' as many sites recommend trying, to no avail. A brand new QUAD Pentium with 3 GB of RAM should be able to run this turd of a program. But no - it's so bloated with new code that the simple act that it was designed for - getting words on the screen - suffers because of it. Just absurd, Microsoft.

The 'Ribbon' interface and new file 'Save as' tree structure are WAY more cumbersome that the old toolbar. I just want to get things done - why did they feel the need for such a massive change? What was wrong with the old system? I take twice as long now browsing to the folder I want. Yes, learning new things 'takes time' - but again, EVERYONE was familiar with the standard toolbar and 'browse to file' techniques. Why change a core skill? Why expect a business (me) to have to spend time learning this new system? What exactly was the point, anyway?

So now I am going to have to UNINSTALL this new $279 package (what a waste) and reinstall Office 2003 just to regain my old performance. And since my last 2003 license died with the old computer (and now cannot be uninstalled to free it up), I'll get the pleasure of dealing with Microsoft to try to recover what I HAVE ALREADY PAID FOR.

The software LOOKS pretty, and has TONS of new features throughout, and that part I like. But if I can't type without looking every second to see if I got it right, and have to type at 1/3 my normal speed, how productive is that?

Beware - if you type a lot with Office, you should NOT BUY THIS VERSION.

I give it two stars for 'pretty' and ZERO for performance in a typing environment.

The new ribbon design is supposed to make it easier to learn and use. It may be for some new users but for experienced users, it isn't. This version takes away some critical nuts & bolts customization features and many tasks now take longer to perform. This is not due to the learning curve, it is the inherent nature of the way the ribbon works. Once you are familiar with the program, nothing is faster than the old menu structure. If Microsoft added an option to allow users to choose between menus and ribbons, it would be the best of both worlds, satisfying the needs of both new and experienced users. The new version does not run macros as fast however. My recommedation for existing users: keep Office 2003 for as long as you can and consider going to Open Office when Microsoft no longer supports 2003 (unless they restore the functionality in a newer release of 2007).

I recently bought a new laptop, and the changeover involved an "upgrade" to Office 2007. I was aware that there was a new user interface, but was not aware that Office 2007 is, in almost every respect, an INFERIOR product to any Office version that came before it!
I have used MS Office for many years, and am what could be called a "power user," especially for Word and Powerpoint, which I use weekly.
One of the great features of Office is that it has been totally customizable. For those who use office frequently, it has been easy to create your own custom toolbars so you have what you need easily available. Most tasks could be done with one or two mouse clicks... Until Office 2007!
In Office 2007, hardly anything is customizable! You have a constantly changing tool ribbon, which takes up a lot of screen real estate.
The ribbon presents a set of icons based on what it "thinks" you will need at the moment. It is rarely right! ... so you go searching through the tabs trying to find the icon that was on the ribbon a few moments earlier! There is one small "tool bar" up on the title bar that you CAN customize, but it is not convenient, and will not hold many icons. It has the option of being moved below the ribbon, which takes up even more screen real estate, but is still very limited, and cannot be docked or moved from there.
Granted, there are third party programs, such as Ribbon Customizer and Toolbar Toggle, that add back some of the ability to customize, but it is still far inferior to what Office users are used to!
Even the third party programs, however, cannot get around the fact that there are some features in earlier Office versions that are simply NOT included in the new one. In previous versions of Powerpoint, you could add a set of icons that, with one mouse click, allowed you to adjust the vertical spacing of text. That has been omitted in 2007. In the "improved" 2007 version, you must open a dialog box, and make several mouse clicks to adjust vertical spacing!
To make matters worse, Office 2007 documents are not compatible with earlier versions. After spending years establishing formats such as .doc and .ppt as industry standards, Microsoft has introduced a version of office that does not use these formats! If you want to send a document to someone who still has Office 2003 (or any other program that reads .doc files) you need to remember to save it in that format. The default 2007 format cannot be opened by earlier versions!
Office 2007 CAN open the older formats, but even in opening earlier Office formats, there are problems. For example, most users of Powerpoint have learned the trick of adding drop shadows behind the text to make the text stand out on the screen. Office 2007 has changed the way these shadows are formed. When you open a powerpoint presentation made on an earlier version, your old drop shadows WILL NOT ANIMATE with the text. When a slide appears, the shadows of the letters are already in place, and the letters animate in on top! Mircosoft's only suggestion... go through your slides and take the old shadows out, and put new shadows in! (I tried this... it takes 30-40 minutes per presentation! ...And I have hundreds of powerpoint presentations in my file!)
For someone who never used Office before, or who just uses Word to type simple letters, 2007 may be okay, but for anyone who depends on Office for detailed tasks and productivity, 2007 is a nightmare.
I have always loved Microsoft Office. It has been an industry standard for ease of use. In my opinion, that is no longer the case. I believe Microsoft tried to produce something "different" to attract new users, but in the process totally ignored the needs of those who have used their products in the past. If you have the option of staying with an earlier version, DO NOT UPGRADE to this product!

After all these years, the trolls in Redmond still have not learned how to produce user-friendly software. There was no reason to make the changes to Office that they've made; it was simply a way to justify an unnecessary upgrade that has turned out to be a downgrade. Users with a moderate understanding of how Office operated will find themselves flummoxed when attempting to do things they had finally learned how to do in the old version.

The much-vaunted ribbons are confusing and counter-intuitive. Microsoft addresses this problem by offering free self-paced trainng courses, apparently oblivious to the fact that time iS money, unless of course, it's Microsoft's time.

At the very least, one expects backward compatibility, that is unless you're dealing with Mr. Bill's minions. I loaded Word files created with Office XP, only to find the Office 2007 converted them with serious defects, like inserting tabs in all paragraphs whenever you inserted one in a single paragraph. And, of course, if you delete a tab stop from one paragraph, you delete it from all of them.

Useless.

I've used the previous version of Office for years. I was comfortable witht the menus and features for Word and Excell. The new version is a complete makeover. All of my experience is in the toilet. Instead of building on the old menus and adding features or capabilities, Microsoft started from the ground up.

The "Help" feature in Word and Excel doesn't Help! MS is using videos and linking to the web to illustrate answers. I'm not looking for a 5 minute video presentation. I want an answer to my question that I can go between my open document/spreadsheet and the answer steps.

I like the Outlook program. The Task feature is a great way of tracking customer/client contacts and reminders will update to the Calendar.

I bought the program because I'm now working at home doing taxes and IRS representation.

I resent MS not giving the option to retain the old menu structure. Because Office is such a standard, they seem to feel it gives them the right to bully users into having to do things their way. Definitely not user friendly and a wasted loss of years of experience with the previous version.

I looked forward to updating my software for my new laptop, but I hate this upgrade. The ribbons make it MORE difficult for me, as I'm used to customizing my toolbar exactly as I want it. Several parts don't work well--when writing a test, the program wouldn't renumber, and I had to do it by hand, so it took twice as long as usual to create the test. I emailed it to school, which has 2003--couldn't open it. Came home, saved the document as a 2003 document, and I still couldn't open it at school. I reinstalled my 2002 software, cut and pasted the test, saved it in 2002, and was able to open it at school (much to the dismay of my students).

The Spanish and German spellchecks work fine, but I still can't figure out how to get it to write Chinese characters, which 2002 can do. The only good thing about the program is that I can finally write Ladino (using the Hebrew alefbet) in 2002, which I could never do before.

The PowerPoint program offers slide-design selections that are about as appealing as rotting road kill--lousy for student shows, boring for professional presentations. Again, the frustrating ribbon situation, which I really dislike.

I find the software so cumbersome and irritating that I've stopped using it, and have gone back to 2002. I strongly recommend avoiding this upgrade as long as humanly possible.

This new version of office has it all. Finally all the promise that we had heard was coming is here. In general all the apps are much improved. My only negative is that outlook takes a long time to start up and needs lots of memory. If you can deal with that, this is a huge improvement over previous versions.

Right out of the box you are going to have to get used to the ribbon interface but once you get it down, it is much quicker than the old way.

Most of the naysayers here are anti microsoft anyway so pay them no mind. If I worked at Sun or Apple I would probably badmouth microsoft all the time too. But I do not and I don't work for Microsoft, so I just use the software, and this was a great upgrade.

The best part of it was the publisher upgrade which is a huge improvement over the last version of publisher. I use it all the time for making flyers, postcards, invitations etc.

Excel, Word and all the others have been commented on by tons of people, but almost noone talks about Publisher. In this version it really is a competitive piece of software to the basic and even some of the advanced Adobe tools. If you could edit PDFs natively that would be great, but because ADOBE is a monopoly, you are stuck overpaying them to edit pdfs. Anyway, you can create pdf files in publisher and save them, which is all anyone really needs.

I'm sure there are some new features that make this version worthwhile. It may even be faster at some things (though I haven't found them yet.) But Microsoft wrapped it in an inscrutable user interface that often flies in the face of logic. The "ribbon" interface is supposed to make it easier for new users to begin working, and, for all I know, it may. But for the millions of current users, it's a nightmare.

A user interface is meant to help you be more productive but Office 2007's interface does the exact opposite of that. Things that took two clicks before now take four. Or, even worse, some previously available tools or functions seem to be completely unavailable. This is considered progress?

I would have expected Microsoft to conduct large-scale interface usability testing before making a change this radical, or to at least offer the previous interface as a selectable option. Unfortunately, it appears that they did neither.

My suggestion? Unless you're forced, stick with Office 2003. It's interface is at times clunky but it's far, far better than this.

I haven't found much worth upgrading for. It was difficult to find things with the new toolbars. I have used this product for over a year now and still can't find some things I want that I used to have readily available on the old tool bars. I think MS should have REAL PEOPLE test their products for ease of use rather than programmers or whatever they use. Wish they had help files that really helped.