Office 2007

[Swampguy]

I think I will get the upgrade for Microsoft Proffessional Office today. Any comments or reviews on Office 2007?

 

[Semper Fidelis]

I've used it in Beta for several months. I'm upgrading. The workflow and "buttonology" is significantly better then Office 2003.

 

[fredtgreco]

This is a great improvement in my opinion. I hope that many people either migrate or install the compatibility pack so I can start using teh new default (.docx) format.

I highly recommend it.

 

[Davidius]

All of us working in the IT offices at my university were given versions of Office 2007 as well as Windows Vista to try out. I think the new version of Office is great and would recommend it to everyone. The interface is much more user-friendly, in my opinion. Instead of all the drop-down menus through which one has to search for hours to find what they want, there are "tabs" that you can click on at the top of the screen to give you an entirely new set of buttons from various categories of options. On top of that, it's a lot prettier. However, like Fred mentioned, there may some compatability issues at the beginning. If you save a document and print it out from another machine that has Word 2003, make sure you save the document as a Word 97-2003 file, otherwise you'll get the new default file extension (.docx) and won't be able to open it on the other machine.

 

[crhoades]

Other than the interface and usability enhancements, is there anything *new* that is worth the upgrade price? I'm pretty content with Word 2003 and would consider myself a power user as far as keyboard shortcuts and getting around the user interface and I use it primarily for basic word processing so I'm looking for a compelling reason to chunk down some money.

I'm also a fan of Nota Bene for academic writing etc. Does the new version handle bibliographic resources and footnotes better?

 

[Davidius]

Other than the interface and usability enhancements, is there anything *new* that is worth the upgrade price? I'm pretty content with Word 2003 and would consider myself a power user as far as keyboard shortcuts and getting around the user interface and I use it primarily for basic word processing so I'm looking for a compelling reason to chunk down some money.

In your case it doesn't sound like the upgrade to 2007 would be very beneficial. However, I may not have been using it long enough to know whether that would be absolutely true.

 

[fredtgreco]

Other than the interface and usability enhancements, is there anything *new* that is worth the upgrade price? I'm pretty content with Word 2003 and would consider myself a power user as far as keyboard shortcuts and getting around the user interface and I use it primarily for basic word processing so I'm looking for a compelling reason to chunk down some money.

I'm also a fan of Nota Bene for academic writing etc. Does the new version handle bibliographic resources and footnotes better?

Chris,

It is hard to say. I also would consider myself a power 2003 Word user. When I worked at the law firm, I regularly was the person the secretaries turned to for advice on how to do this or that.

I will say that 2007 is much faster - formatting tables, headers, footers, etc. It also has more functionality - themes, etc. It also has better live previews, can convert files to pdf right within word, and eventually has much smaller file sizes (the docx versions). My guess is that within a year the docx will be a semi-standard, since MS has a free conversion tool for Office 2003/XP users to use.

One other thing - the UI changes to Outlook aren't as pronounced, but it has better functionality: RSS feeds, better calendar viewing, better color categorizing of items, etc.