Microsoft Office has been a top selling professional desktop package for more years than many of us care to recall.
At one time you bought a spreadsheet from a spreadsheet company, a database from another, a word processor from a third and so on.
In the 1990s that all changed, and after a series of acquisitions and mergers it basically boiled down to making a choice between Microsoft Office, with Word, Excel, Outlook etc or IBM with WordPro, Lotus 123, Notes and so on. ‘New Kids on the block’ offered spirited cross-platform packages such as ‘Star Office’ but were ultimately dismissed by 90% of businesses as simply being ‘too different’ and consequently hard to support.
Eventually, MS Office reined supreme, largely by sheer force of numbers.
The basic functionality of Office remained largely unaltered for the best part of fifteen years – in spite of inconsistencies between the various software development teams (was Access is notoriously different from Word and Excel) everyone seemed to accept there were particular ways of doing things and we all just got on with it.
THEN in 2007, some bright spark decided to redesign the look and feel of Office from first principles.
A more consistent look was implemented, and instead of the familiar ‘dropdown’ options which had remained remarkably consistent, the ‘ribbon’ interface was introduced.
The belief was that this was more in keeping with the ‘sexy’ layout of Windows Vista, and to be fair, it’s a far more ‘integrated’ package.
The ‘normal’ price of MS Office Enterprise is around the five hundred quid mark.
For this you get updated favourites such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher and Access. In addition – there’s new offerings; OneNote – an information management utility InfoPath – fundamentally a forms management utility Groove – group collaboration software - I’ve not had occasion to try these out yet,
I obtained a copy of MS Office Enterprise entirely legitimately for the princely sum of £17!
My wife works in the Health Service, and they have negotiated a ‘Home Use’ licence – this means Microsoft are willing to let employees of large organisations use the latest software for little more than the media and distribution costs.
Most big employers will be running earlier versions of office, and this is a way of ensuring when they eventually DO get around to installing the 2007 version, a sufficiently large user-base will have built up skills at home to take the changes in their stride.
Which neatly introduces the downside.
It’s greatest selling points are at one in the same time it’s greatest weakness.
Previously, you could have been familiar with an ‘old’ version of office, uninstalled it, put the new one in, and within minutes, be productively using the new package. Everything was pretty much where you expected it to be, if just a little different (introduction of tabs rather than lists of options and so on).
Office 2007 doesn’t follow this trend – the ‘ribbon’ probably DOES present options in a more logical and integrated fashion, and it DOES integrate better with enterprise applications – whereas OLE offered functionality from one application in another, it was a bit of a fiddle to engineer, and the results were scarcely ‘seamless’ – 2007 is a far slicker product.
BUT (and it’s a big but) new users will find it very frustrating to use because nothing is where you expect it to be!
Expect several days of frustration trying to navigate the new layout. Help is at hand however.
Whether it was deliberate, or simply an oversight, Microsoft hasn’t provided a ‘skin’ to present familiar functions in a familiar way!
That task has fallen to a third party ‘Addintools.com’ who have written a ‘skin’ called ‘Classic Menu for Office’ which is ‘exactly what it says on the tin’ – a series of options in familiar drop-down menus.
You can download a time-limited trial for free, the licence cost is around twenty quid.
I would argue this should have been a ‘standard feature’ but clearly Microsoft thought otherwise, believing that the extra functionality offered by the new layout outweighed any temporary discomfort.
If you’re thinking of installing Office 2007, I would put ‘Classic’ as a very high priority add-on.
I won’t go into the minute detail of what’s changed on each and every program in the suite – doubtless there will be plenty of articles written about this.
What you get is a truly integrated and consistent package of software, which (almost for the first time) looks like it was thought of as a whole, rather than being a loose formation of disparate programs.
It looks sexy (in a sad sort of way) and doubtless in eighteen months we’ll be wondering what all the fuss was about, but in the meantime, don’t expect this to be a quick and easy transition.
I noticed a couple of glitches in the software – I was trying to do some cut and pasting of tables between applications, when they crashed. This is an entirely new rewrite, and occasional hickups are only to be expected – use the Microsoft update service to stay ahead of the game.
This is truly the shape of business computing to come, but don’t be lulled into a sense of false security by believing this is a trivial upgrade.
If you’re entirely happy with the ‘old’ office I’d tend to hold off upgrading for a few months yet, and when you do, seriously consider factoring in the cost of ‘Classic Menu’, otherwise eleven out of ten for effort, seven out of ten for backwards compatibility.
More details
Reliability
Average
Range of extra features / functions
Satisfactory
Manufacturer Support
Good
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