Customer Reviews

Microsoft Office Excel 2007 [Old Version]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

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).

Only a total beginner who has never used a spreadsheet product before, a person who uses a spreadsheet for nothing more than summing a grocery list, or an MS employee or paid shill, could possible find the 2007 version of Office an improvement. It is by far the WORST upgrade of any S/W I have seen in 25 years of using S/W of every kind, including developing many tools myself. Horrible, and another example of MS going for glitz in place of functionality. Remember Bill Gate's "Bob" concept, and how stupid and horrible that was,,,,, this is a modern version of those stupid ideas. Office 2007 is absolutely terrible. Just see what the vast user community has to say about it. I know no one who likes it. Anyone who gives it any kind of a positive review must have a questionable motive. Garbage. If you don't believe me buy this turkey and see for yourself.

Did MS purposely move everything around to make Excel harder to use? The placements of functions/menu items simply does not make sense to me. I have spend countless hours looking for simple things that are now buried in this completely unintuitive interface. I keep thinking, maybe if I just get used to the new interface, it will start to make sense. Nope. It just is not intuitive at all.

If there's one thing Microsoft has perfected lately, it's how to deliver a terrible product. It really is astonishing. It's almost as if Microsoft has stopped reviewing their ideas with users and they're just flailing about releasing junk.

I make a living making technical charts. Needless to say, I had this down to an art form in Powerpoint/Excel 2003. In a couple of quick clicks of the mouse I could use a customized chart template to transform any given dataset instantly into a (nearly) perfectly tweaked format that I ALWAYS use. Also, when I wanted to make very minor edits to charts embedded in Powerpoint, I could simply edit the embedded worksheet "behind" the chart and instantly the chart would update to reflect the change. No longer are any of these incredibly efficient features workable based on my admittedly limited experience so far. What used to take me 45 seconds now takes 45 minutes. Worse, once I've created a chart template that I would like to apply to a new data set, the result is an absolutely mangled mess that is worse than useless - it's easier just to repeat the 50+ trivial edits than try to make the template product anything but utter garbage. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. I can no longer edit charts that are in Powerpoint without recreating the chart first in Excel...I see no option to paste in the actual Excel worksheet thereby embedding the actual data for future tweaking. While the pasted image is supposed to link back to the real Excel chart, apparently that means I have to save the source data for each chart in separate excel files or I can never go back and edit my presentation, because I'm getting a link failure message. Infuriating. This is truly a horrible productivity hit. Yes, it makes beautiful charts, but I wonder if they actual let any power/technical users test this junk before releasing it? My wrists are hurting from this abuse.

I seriously wonder if they tested this with any actual Excel users. I gave it two stars only because there are some improvements over Excel 2003, but the new menu navigation is phenomenally flawed. I've been using it for several months and it still drives me nuts.

Just one infinitesimal example to whet your appetite:

I create a percentage by dividing one number by another. The result is 0.12961%. I don't want to see this many decimal places, so I open up the "Home" banner, click the "Decrease Decimal" icon and the number now reads 0.1296%. The banner has closed, so I must reopen the banner and again locate the "Decrease Decimal" icon and click it again. Now I have 0.129%. Repeat...Repeat...

Maddening I must say.

Others not happy about this version of Excel saved me lots of typing. 100% agree. My reason for upgrading was the inherent memory limitations of Excel 2000, so my spreadsheets are pretty large.
I find basic bugs and repeatedly have crashes. In Bangalore they will say anything to make you believe they have solved the problem, and seem to assume you are an absolute novice (but go about it in a nice-enough way). Their technical training does not impress me. They will for instance tell me how to restore files (causing loss of formatting etc.) after a crash when I call to report a crash. And then, "Do you agree that the issue has been resolved?"! The root causes for these crashes, I have to admit, is outside their scope. But the eagerness to close out their "workorders" rather than saying that this seems to be a bug and we will ensure that this is reported to the programmers "bugs me". For instance, I have worksheets where copy and paste behaves as if I am pasting fixed addresses, but have found that if I use Paste Special Formulas it will do what it is supposed to do. Calling Bangalore, I am told that if I start my cell with +1 then I can incrementally increase my cell values, so do we agree we can close this out? I know he understood the problem, as he told me he had the same happen on his machine. And here I was told that they will not copy anything from my machine!
The menu is plain awful (but pretty to look at). You will do a lot of traveling with your mouse, that is for sure. You can fix this by customizing the Quick Access Toolbar by making your own menu. It is essentially a workaround to the regression of the program menu. Having used the software "continuously" for the last 6 weeks the logic behind the menu still escapes me,.... every day I wonder what this development team was thinking. In cooking a meal, everything you need should be in an area where it makes sense. Rather than having everything in drawers, cupboards and closets in the kitchen, this version of Excel places the wood for the stove where it logically would be found.... in the woodshed in the backyard. The utensils for cooking are placed with other tools..... but they are in the garage. The placemats for the table ..... are located in the linen closet upstairs. While there is some logic to this, it just is not practical!
Once you start working with this 2007 version of Excel you will soon see some very familiar menus come up. However, there are menus where I have found that some of the functions do not work, or what used to come up as a complete (menu-) list now has to be scrolled after you find it.

I have to say that by and large, Vista is better. Excel 2007 is absolutely horrible to me, though. I've used Excel XP a LOT, and am very familiar with it. The transparent interface and flexibility with its functions and Macros is unparalleled by anything this side of Matlab or Mathematica, plus you can do so many every-day things too.

With Excel 2007, Microsoft seems to be trying to appeal to the stupid among the masses who are impressed with eye candy, and ease and simplicity of easy and simple tasks, so they've dumbed down the functionality and constrained many of their functions that were previously general and flexible so as to be only for one clearly defined product bullet point. For instance: in Excel XP you used to be able to use conditional formatting on almost anything such as making the text color grey if the value is equal to that of the cell above, now you can pretty much only use conditional formatting in limited ways on numbers alone. Almost any time I've tried to do anything with Excel 2007 beyond just data entry, it took at least 10 times longer than it would in XP, trying to figure out how to modify their designer's vision of what all spreadsheets should be like into what I want, or how to interpret their much to colloquially worded dialog boxes, ultimately having to resort to agonizing trial-and-error for something they should just state plainly. The most consistently annoying thing for me (and this is just one example of many similar things) is that the combination of Ctrl+Shift+Down (and Up) doesn't do a **** thing anymore - they haven't put it to use, not even on something I wouldn't but others would use, it just does absolutely nothing! Ctrl+Shift+Left and Ctrl+Shift+Right still work, but not Up or Down! (Ctrl+Shift+Down used to select every cell starting at the current cell and going down until it either encountered a blank cell or stopped encountering non-empty cells - similar controls exist in all Microsoft software) I would and could write a Macro to do this that runs off the Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down shortcut and it's really not too difficult, but then you can't undo afterword, as you can't with any Macros in Office products.

Basically, if you have any significant geeky or right-brain leanings, or if you've grown very comfortable with past versions of Excel, you will almost certainly be frustrated with this and find yourself trying to get Pre-Vista Excel installed on your Vista computer. I sincerely hope this is not the future of Microsoft software.

The user interface is completely different from previous versions making the transition more difficult. On top of that, the new interface sucks and is cluttered. There is no simple way to bring in your custom menus from older versions. Stick with an older version! This one is no good.

Excel 2007 replaces the tried and true menu layout with new graphical ribbon that is totally alien to experienced users.

Save your money, do not buy Excel 2007 if you expect to find a product that remotely resembles any of the previous Excel versions.

Excel still has some very good functionality at its core, but that only makes the new interface more of a disaster.

Experienced users will find it extremely frustrating to use, but the problem goes beyond the learning curve. The "Ribbon" interface requires a lot more clicking for most functions, so everything takes longer than with older versions of Excel. Stick with the previous version of Excel, or try OpenOffice.