Customer Reviews

Microsoft Office Standard 2007 UPGRADE [Old Version]

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

Normally I might wait to install a new software upgrade, but I just got a new laptop and thought it would be best to use Office 2007 with the new Vista operating system. I was wrong.

You would expect that a multi-billion dollar company like Microsoft could put out a powerful and bug-free piece of software. But after a month of using Office 2007, you get the distinct impression that this software is not ready for public release. Microsoft should be ashamed.

I don't know the root cause of my problems, but I have to stress that I am running a clean install of Office 2007 on Vista, so there shouldn't be any software conflicts or issues.

So what are my issues? The list is long:

-- My biggest concern is that MS Word constantly hangs and stalls. It can making editing a document very painful. I suspect the problem is when I put images or Visio diagrams into a document. But that is something the old MS Word was able to do without an issue. Oddly, if I have a colleague open the document and save it out in Word 2003, the problem goes away! What?! It's killing my productivity.

-- When ever I cut and paste from an old document, Word hangs for 15 to 20 seconds. And often the formatting and margins in my new document go haywire. I keep having to spend a ton of time fixing things. This never happened in the old Word. This is another time killer.

-- Every few days, Outlook 2007 starts telling me that it cannot display my email folders. Uh oh! I have to completely restart my computer to see my email again.

-- Outlook 2007 breaks many graphic emails that people send -- they look like a mess. It is because Outlook 2007 does NOT render HTML correctly since it uses the Word engine, not Internet Explorer to display email. I have no idea why Microsoft did this, but they have got to fix it.

-- Many of the issues in the old Word 2003 still haven't been fixed. If you place an image, it can often be hard to get it to appear correctly. Why can't they solve this one?

-- While most Office programs have the new ribbon interface (which I like), some programs like Visio 2007 do not. So you have to remember how to use two interfaces. Couldn't Microsoft find the time and money to update ALL its programs? Give me a break.

-- On a few occassions in Visio 2007, my files have failed to save correctly. At first I thought this must have been my fault, but it's happened to me a few times and can't be a coincidence. A few times I've gotten an error message and lost my work. Ug.

-- Word and Excel 2007 use a completely new file format. So anyone you send a document to has to have 2007 installed (which isn't likely the case). To get around this, you can save it down to a 2003 file format, but then you end up with two files on your hard drive -- one in the new format and one in the old format. What a pain! Also, there definitely seems to be an issue with Office 2007 opening older Office 2003 files. Could be the cause of many of my problems, but there is no way I can avoid using old files. They should have worked harder on compatibility.

There are good things about the new 2007. I do like the new interface design and the new features in Outlook 2007 are amazing for organizing tasks and sharing your calendar.

But I don't think it's fair that Microsoft released a product so full of serious, serious bugs that have cost me hours and hours of extra work. I didn't spend hundreds of dollars on a beta product and don't think the public should have to suffer. Surely they can afford to do better!

I have used Excel as the primary tool of my consulting practice for the past eight years and can do things with charting that most folks would have no clue how to do. I say this not to boast, but to speak to other experienced users who are considering the switch to Office 2007.

The change from Office 2003 to 2007 is unlike any other upgrade -- it is the most difficult learning (unlearning?) curve I've ever faced. My analogy is to a carpenter where someone changed all his tools (all the settings, all the functionality), and then hid them. That's what '07 Excel is like: you can't find your tools (they aren't where they used to be), and they don't do what they used to do. It is enormously frustrating, and simple tasks (like formatting a chart) that used to take 3 minutes now take hours.

There are some nice new features: conditional formatting has more than 3 choices (yeah), you are no longer limited to 250 columns (yeah), etc; these functionality and capacity improvements are welcome. But 99% of the changes are arbitrary and useless (e.g., you now can find the "macros" tool in the "View" tab -- just where you would've guessed, huh? And how about adding a "Comment" box to a cell? Where might you find the "Comment" tool? Under the "Review" tab (how many guesses did it take?). And the help files are absolutely useless -- the worst yet for MS, and I've thought their help files were lousy in the past.

The biggest frustration is colors. I used to be able to hand set 64 different colors on my color palette -- I created a palette much nicer than the gaudy set supplied by Office '03. But now MS supplies you with a myriad of color palettes which they think are best. You can edit 8 colors, but then the rest a automatically chosen for you (with no rhyme or reason I can detect). And if you laboriously create some new colors for a particular file, they are all forgotten on any new file.

If I were a VP at Microsoft, I'd take the entire MS Office team, which must number in the thousands, and downsize it by 90%. The useful changes in Office '07 are few in number, and could've been done by a small group. The Office Team is a perfect example of a big corporation growing like crazy and then trying to justify it's existence by making useless changes.

I'll stick with the upgrade, because my customers are beginning to upgrade and I have to keep pace with them, and 4-5 years from now we'll go through this again. But this new version of Office takes the cake for a multiplicity of useless and incomprehensible changes.

The product requires activation, which includes sending machine identification information to Microsoft.

The good news is that the Office Standard license allows installation on both a desktop system AND a laptop. It also allows you to transfer the license to new systems, over time.

From the license: "Before you use the software under a license, you must assign that license to one device. ... You may install another copy on a portable device for use by the single primary user of the licensed device. ... You may reassign the license to a different device any number of times, but not more than one time every 90 days"

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!

Office 2003 had it's share of difficulties, but was overall a useful application, as were the previous versions of Office. I was never a huge fan, but appreciated the common logic of the application and with each upgrade they've continued to move forward with improvements.

Now they've introduced a set of applications that are a gigantic leap backwards in productivity and usability. It's loaded with overburdened, irregular icons and hidden menus. All of the menu sets, menu names, and functionality has been completely rearranged with no noticeable benefit for the user.

Even the help functionality, of all things, has been rendered completely differently and contains less information and more generalities referencing help for Word within Outlook and vice versa. This would be helpful except that the same menu name bears entirely different meaning between the two applications now.

Menus are also too light so you can't really tell if highlights are active or passive in drop menus. Drop menus change radically within each element of the frame or window, and there are layers upon layers of custom menus you need to build from scratch.

Let me say that again... you need to build your own menus. I'm not kidding.

Basic functionlity that you used to find as a default icon in the last several versions you need to hunt down in a "Quicklaunch" type supermenu that's hidden above (or below) the default icon menu.

I am a web usability, design, and production professional who's used more beta applications and experimental software than most users could imagine and I'm warning *anyone* to stay away from this until you absolutely must upgrade. Microsoft needs time to get the content updated on the help screens and create some functionality to return to "classic" menus that can be customized later.

I generally have a lot of patience for new applications and have been accused of being to accomodating to bad usability by Microsoft in the past. Well in this case, I've never been so frustrated by *any* application.

I need to be productive and this set me back by at least a day already.

Be warned!!!!!

I upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007 because Microsoft no longer provides technical support for Office 2003.
In my opinion the new Office 2007 is full of bugs. As an I example I had previously developed a large (23 meg) PowerPoint presentation using Office 2003 that had worked fine under PowerPoint 2003. However, Microsoft Office 2007 has now corrupted the presentation. Special graphics such as custom bullets do not display under PowerPoint 2007. Under PowerPoint 2007 the text in text boxes, such as title boxes, falls outside the box.
It will probably take me more than 200 hours to clean up the mess in this presentation that was caused by upgrading to Microsoft Office 2007.
In summary, beware of switching to Microsoft Office 2007 if you have previously developed large files under Office 2003.

At first glance, I had rated it five stars. I had the beta version of Office 2007 that Microsoft had given to me to test. I really loved that version. When I bought it (because it expires after 3 months) everything went down hill. They did not fix all of the glitches. In Word, I cannot make my Headers and Footers work properly. They have a really cool Headers and Footer (window) where you can make any document look really beautiful. Well it doesn't work. I am really upset with this considering they had enough time to fix the glitches. I mean it worked for me when it was a Beta, and you would really expect the problem to be with the Beta and not the finished product. It stinks! When I asked them what they were going to do about it, they gave me a song and a dance about fixing it myself. They gave me all of these instructions to "Do It Myself". I followed these instructions, and it (headers and footers)still does not work. So now what, purchase another copy? I think not! Microsoft are a bunch of crooks! Their customer reps know nothing about their products.

Don't buy this version! Wait until they fix the glitches! Never purchase a product when it is first released (software) it always comes with problems and brings misery and frustration.

Current experience
It is possible to avoid some problems by loading an Office 2007 product (Excel, Word, etc.) before starting other programs.

February 2008
It is still slow. Office2007 seems to have problems getting along with some software, namely evidence eliminator. After intervening several times, it has become a ritual of closing office to run EE. EE is my data scrambling program. I have loaded the recent updates and Office seems to be a little easier to operate, though it is frightfully slow to start. One nasty trick is that closing a document by using the 'X' in the corner results in office terminating; the only safe way to close a file is from the file bar, or what passes for the file bar. One nice feature is that you now can access more than 5 past files from the file bar. I would give them 3 stars now.

12/07 experience
At first, I thought my vast experience with programming could overcome some of the flaws. I was wrong. This software is defective in a number of ways. First, customizing does not work. Second, autoformating is a failure. I retract my 3 stars and give them 2. If this continues, make it one.

Early experience
In it's 2003 form, Microsoft Office had reached it's pinnacle. Like most people, I created an array of personalized buttons that began to resemble the clutter of keys on a church organ; add together the footpedals, knobs, levers and controls and small wonder musicians take pride at mastering it! With a series of touch buttons at the corner of boxes for less used controls, and the organization of these buttons into categories, some of the clutter is gone.

The small size of all these buttons is a shock, especially for those of us with reading glasses and laptops. It would be nice if the sliding zoom control in the right corner could also magnify the buttons as well as the text. All of this takes time to adjust.

One of the properties I like least is how long it takes to load a file. I counted over 60 seconds. With the upgrade, I was hoping that this would improve from Office XP. Perhaps future downloads from Microsoft will reduce start-up time.
Another feature that I do not like in Word is the listing of "Normal", "Heading 1", "Heading 2", "Title", etc. These buttons are huge compared to others and used least of all. It would be a far better approach to have put them under their own category in the master headings on top: Home, Insert, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review, and View.
I have noticed that once I ran Excel a few times it loads very fast. This is an improvement over Excel 2003. I will update this review as I gain more experience with Excel and Powerpoint.
This gets back to the reason for buying Office 2007. Working with XP will expose your computer to unnecessary risk to bugs. Before loading this upgrade, I erased my old Office XP files to get rid of a bug. The longer a software has been out there, the easier it is to invade and the slower it will run as countermeasures are installed. So, here's your choice, buy a used version of Office 2003 for $150 or Office 2007 for $200. You decide, but remember that Office 2003 will need to be replaced by 2008 and Office 2007 may get you to 2012.
If this review is helpful, please add your vote.

PS April 28 2009
Recently Microsoft or Evidence Eliminator re-wrote their software for better cooperation. Now, there is no delay in loading Office 2007 and no conflict with EE. I am quite pleased with the results. I suggest uninstalling and re-installing both programs. EE will upgrade to version 6.0 and Office will also update.

PS July 1, 2009
AS I HAVE USED MICROSOFT OFFICE, I HAVE COME TO APPRECIATE IT. I ESPECIALLY LIKE THE HELPBAR THAT I CAN WRITE AND RE-WRITE OVER AND OVER AGAIN TO SUIT A PARTICULAR EDITING TASK. FOR EXAMPLE, WHEN UPDATING AN EXCEL SPREADSHEET, I SPACED COPY AND PASTE FORMULA NEARBY SO THAT I COULD RE-USE IT CONTINUALLY DURING EDITING. LATER, I REPLACED THESE WITH OTHER FUNCTION KEYS TO MAKE MY TASK EASIER. ONCE YOU GET USED TO THIS IDEA, EDITING CAN BE EASIER.

I AM HOPING MICROSOFT WILL ADD A FEW MORE FUNCTIONS TO MAKE IT POSSIBLE TO CHANGE LINKS MORE EASILY.

The company I work for has upgraded to Office 2007, so I figured I'd upgrade at home to be compatible. After reading all the reviews here, I've decided to wait and not upgrade at home until I have to - hoping maybe with all these issues, my employer will call a halt and go back to 2003!

I've used Office 2007 at the office for about 2 weeks now, and after getting used to the new Ribbon feature, I actually like the new interface. I agree with one review here that said the ribbon is too large, though. It would be nice to be able to resize it.

The major reason I am not upgrading at home is all the reports of Office 2007 being slow, and corrupting files created in Version 2003. I have been having these problems at work, but thought the issues were due to a network problem. The most annoying slow problem is pasting things from one document to another, even within the same application (Word to Word or Excel to Excel). It's not just a little slow... it is agonizingly slow! I have taken to moving on to other tasks while I wait for Word or Excel to paste, and then go back to the document later. I'm relieved to know this isn't actually our company's network problem, but it has convinced me NOT to upgrade at home.

As far as the file corruption problem, I have experienced having to reformat bullets and other things due to the new interface in a few small files, but shudder at the scale of the time it will take for my larger files. I pity my employer having to pay for my extra time wasted in this kind of clean up work. I have also experienced the problems mentioned with Outlook not being able to recognize your email folders. Again I thought this was a network problem at the office, and didn't realize it was the Office 2007 upgrade doing it. I plan to back up all my email folders as soon as I get to work on Monday as I dread having a glitch and losing all my saved emails!

The other annoying thing about the new Outlook interface is something also previously mentioned here - the change in use and display of "flags" and "categories". In 2003 I had an extensive system set up using the various flag colors, which is now completely lost due to the color system being moved from flags to categories. ARGH!!!!!

Thanks to the reviewers here for your input and giving me the benefit of your trials and tribulations with the software.

I bought this product because I needed a new laptop and of course it has the awful Vista on it. I haven't even tried to tackle anything other than Outlook yet and I'm already completely fed up. I spent many hours trying to find solutions for all of the glitches Outlook has and it still doesn't work. I'm having problems with it that people have had for over a year and it's still not working properly. If I could return everything I just purchased and buy an Apple, I would.