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After my nasty encounter with the Office 2007 demo installed on my new mini-laptop, I hoped I was done with that monstrosity for a long time (I purged it and installed good ol' Office 97).

No such luck. This past weekend, for absolutely NO good reason, IT upgraded all our desktop PCs to Office 2007. Say goodbye to  productivity for the next week or so.  :-( 

Here's what I've learned so far:
-- The changes to Outlook are mostly harmless.
-- Word isn't so bad once you figure out how to hide the offensively huge and cartoonish new "ribbon" (that thing we used to call a toolbar). Once you minimize the toolbar, what's left at the top of the window looks a lot like the old menus, except that you get this big balloony sideways thing instead of a dropdown menu. And, of course, all the things you would normally be looking for in the menus have been cleverly moved, and in some cases renamed.

-- Excel.... OMG, what a tragedy!!  I adore Excel and use it constantly, at home and at work. The interface is second nature to me. And one of the the first things I do when I get a new computer is customize the toolbar. The new "ribbon" is not customizable. The only concession that Microsoft has made for their experienced users is to provide a little mini-toolbar that is completely customizable. This is probably enough for me in Word, where I use keyboard shortcuts most of the time anyway. But it's not going to be enough for Excel.

This so totally totally sucks. I can't imagine what Microsoft thought they were doing with this thing. It looks like they were trying to copy Apple, with huge cartoony icons that are almost the size of postage stamps. But why would a company with more than 90% of the market share copy a company with less than 10%? This thing has Vista fingerprints all over it.

Date: 2009-02-05 01:59 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] wombat-socho.livejournal.com
Can you drag the ribbon from the side to the top of the screen? One used to be able to do the reverse (drop the toolbars to the side) in older versions of Office...

Date: 2009-02-05 04:05 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dreamshark.livejournal.com
Forget what you used to be able to do. This is a whole new interface, one based on the idea that Microsoft knows what you need better than you do.

Date: 2009-02-06 02:01 am (UTC)

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