Microsoft Office 2007 v 2003 - any preferences?

I installed the 60 day demo of Office 2007 and I don't like the look of it - it is all to namby-pamby skinned for me.

I hate the menus - I love the standard, old-fashioned, drop-down menus that are so familiar to Windows users - which it doesn' t have.

I had heard that MS were pressuring distributors to sell 2007 and many businesses don't want to upgrade to it - like they don't want to upgrade to Vista.

Anyone think Office 2007 is better than 2003?

Anyone prefer it?

I think the menus stink - I can't find half the things I should be able to just see straight away.

Heard Office 2007 is quite good but personally I haven't used it.

The problem is not that 2007 is better/worse than 2003 - its just that people like what they're used to and are generally initially dismissive of anything new, even if there's no logical reason for it.

The thing is - those top Menus (File - Edit - View, etc) - standard Windows drop-down menus - have gone.





It's a disgrace.

They've gone in WMP11 by default, too, and IE7.

I'd hazard a guess that, like both of the above, there's an option somewhere to show traditional menus.

Possibly.

With WMP I always turn off the stupid skins - same with XP, I shunt it to Classic view. My IE7 had them as default, so no problems there.

From a die-hard Word 2003-using friend that updated to 2007:
"Well....ok if you don't care that it completely removes your auto text files, never to be found again, nor are you able to put the delivery point bar code on envelopes, and that the program decides what you should have available on the tool bars... shall I go on? The same complaints apply for all the other Office 2007 programs. Beware the "updates and improvements".........."

Personally, I use PowerPoint a lot, and love the new additions! Word is okay. You lose some functionality to a nicer design. I guess if you're a casual user you'll like it, but if you've used 2003 forever and have lots of shortcuts set, you'll rue the day you heard of an update... And I agree with Gfk about people hating the new stuff initially.. The exception to that might be Vista. (At least until more (any) games use dx10!!)

Just saw the new posts - as far as I know, if you update, you will
never see your beloved toolbars/menu again... :-(

I'd pick Office 2003 over 2007 any day, because I absolutely can't stand the new GUI. Note that there is a free Office 2007 compatibility pack that you can download which will add support for the office 2007 file formats to office 2003, so no need to upgrade in order to deal with the newer files...

that said, for home use I'm more than happy with the completely free Open Office. It looks more like Office 2003 than that Office 2007 does...

I want my menus back.

I like them.

They are a part of Windows.

Office 2007 is like a software version of the PlayStation3 case.

What? If that means you don't like the PS3's OS, them I'm behind you 100%.
Mainly due to the fact that you can't watch videos over the internet with the OS. Would someone PLEASE make a flash plugin that works on the PS3?!!

No, I don't like the case the PS3 is inside - it is ugly.

It and Office 2007 were clearly separated at birth.

It takes a bit of getting used to word 2007, but you don't need your old drop down menus. It's pretty easy to find your way around the new tabs and opening and saving docs is pretty straightforward. To be honest I didn't even notice the menubar was missing untill I read this post, completely forgot lol.

Yes. Sure you'll never find many of the things you need, when you're looking for it, and the Danish version still has the "Find" shortcut on CTRL + B, rather than CTRL + F, which is stupid, because it's the only application that does that, and it's inconsistent beyond stupidity. But it's miles better than Word 2003 (for instance it won't screw up the formatting on documents written in an English version of Word, if those documents are loaded in a Danish version of Word, and then saved back to disk.

I still prefer Open Office over either of the two tho'.

No. It means he doesn't like the PS3's case. Obviously.

I can't stand the whole anti menu crusade Vista is putting on.

They're trying to be stylish to compete with Mac, and to do so they're sacrificing functionality.

Its just awful.

What?

Does Vista have this flaw too?

No. And its a change, not a flaw.

Open Office is good enough for me. I have a version of 2007 and 2003 from the company but have hardly used them (theres no point).

2 weeks ago I installed Office 2007 as a test case on one of the receptionist machines at work. Everyone else uses 2003. These girls "live" in Outlook and Word. That machine is now easily the most popular one in that department. The general feedback is: "I want 2007 too!".

Im happy with Office XP. Don't know or care what year it came out. It works the way I want it to, not I work the way it wants me to ;)

What do you mean the PS3 is ugly?!

Microsoft Office 2007 v 2003 - any preferences?

After installing 2003, i use OO.

Ive tryed the demo of office 2007 and found it quite good. I like the look its crisp and clean, BUT i also like the classic window interface and dropback to classic look.

I like 2007 because it is easier for me to use.

Not sure why everyone is complaining. :)

Interesting. Back at the UN, the few people who had already seen and used Vista and Office 2007 didn't like it at all -- they all wanted to go back to Office 2003 (and XP). I'm glad that I won't be there when HQ in Geneva decides to migrate the entire organization to Vista and 2007 - it will be a support nightmare for the IT folks, and it'll be all pain and no gain. Most of the machines there are suboptimal for Vista, and the OS does not have any benefit over XP. I

n fact, in the 1 1/2 years that I've used Vista in that large corporate setup, I found that it needed more support than XP and that it was overly complex and complicated to use, especially in the network area. Office 2007 might have some useful new features that Office 2003 does not have, but the question is whether anybody really needs them or can take advantage of them.

User training is another (expensive) issue, and a migration only makes sense when there is something to gain from it. Neither Vista nor 2007 seem to offer enough in this regard, and that's probably why most corporations are sitting this round of Windows and Office updates out.

It was a similar situation when 2000 came out; most companies and organizations that I had to do with migrated from NT to XP and Server 2003 and left Win 2000 out. Some of those companies only finished that migration last year. It's safe to assume that they will wait with the next update for Windows 7 or maybe even its successor.

I find Office 2007 a real huge improvement over 2003. The menus are only a small part and once you get used the menus they actually make sense and work well. For me the biggest improvement is in Excel. Now we can have a million rows, and not limited to 256 columns in pivot tables any more. Conditional formatting is a god send, and also the files sizes are much smaller on all apps. Access has greatly improved as well. 2003 Word documents were stupidly large compared to better looking docs made in 2007. I wouldn't go back to 2003 now.

Spill the beans.

Throw me a bone.

The tortoise has the cheese on it's back.

A nappy is never full, it is only half-past 10.

What's the dropback option?

Hand it over.

@puki,

sorry reading my post does not contain all that was in my head ;) maybe a little to much drink! I should have referred to windows xp/vista os itself.

however under vista i cant get that close 100% win98 look i like.

kev

Hmm, I have 2003 installed at this time, through choice. After using the 2007 beta for months, I still couldn't adjust to find what I wanted when I wanted it and instead spent ages each time I needed something simple, just looking for it.

After the beta expired, I installed OpenOffice and used that for a couple of years. I've now switched back to good old 2003 because compatibility is just not high enough.

Well you need to take into consideration the staff concerned in my test were women, and they very much preferred the new aesthetic. They also felt that learning a new application (version) broadened their skills base - ie, it was good for the resume. This is 2007 on XP btw. I also have one Vista machine test case running and I too find it very quirky networking-wise. I'm planning on holding out for Windows 7 - and see which way the wind blows then.

My personal prefference is for Open Office...

At my work the manager two tiers above me got 2007. He's the senior developer in the company, and I remember it taking him half an hour to figure out how to print a document when he got 2007. *chuckle*.

David, now here's the even more interesting aspect: The staff at the UN who did not like Office 2007 and Vista... were also women! To be more precise, G-Staff ladies whose job descriptions include lots of work in Word and Excel, and they need to do it fast.

One comment was that Vista looks "playful" and that all the things that used to be simple would now be complicated or features would be hard to find. The the new Office 2007 look didn't find much love, either - everybody was missing the well-known menus and they were complaining that they couldn't find their way through the new design.

Banshee, OpenOffice certainly is a valid choice for personal use. The problem is that when you work at a huge place where a lot of document exchange with the rest of the world takes place, OpenOffice is the worst possible choice. The world does not only speak Visa (yes, the credit card slogan), it definitely speaks Microsoft Office as well, from the United States to Korea, from Russia to Antarctica. It is -the- de facto standard - "resistance is futile." I spent a couple of years at the UN 'evangelizing' Open Standards. Nobody wanted to listen. "This is what everybody else uses." End of discussion.

I have a couple of other word processors and spread sheets on my Mac. But as soon as I have to submit a document to somebody - or receive a document - I find myself in Office:Mac 2004. Can't say that I love it much, but that's the way it is.

Actually, some large corporations are force-feeding OO.O as the standard office package. The company i work for used to provide MS-office as part of the standard image under a whopping site license.

Now they include an open office which has been modified to make .DOC format the default file format. Also there is training groups for any people who find it hard to migrate & how to quickly convert if any 2007 files come from other places. MSO is still available from the companies "webshop" but anyone who insists on it but their department has to pay for it. Also the official company doc standard is XP/2k97.doc and pdf. Anyone using 2007 have been told to save in the correct format.

You'd think so, wouldn't you?

Unfortunately, no such thing. Your only options are things like this:
http://www.addintools.com/english/menuoffice/

Absolutely *insane* that there is no classic menu option built-in...

Now, if I had to make a guess: I'd assume that Microsoft is forcing this change down your throat just so they could patent the snot out of the new 'ribbon bars' and such, preventing free alternatives from using them. Fast forward a couple of years, and open office would look archaic to many users. Just one more little thing to ensure lock-in...

Although it seems to have backfired a bit, in that the new menu system is a huge hurdle to implementation. I know that in our organization we have several hundred PC's that we're keeping on 2003 simply because the switch to the new GUI would be to disruptive for many people... (Microsoft's biggest competitor is Microsoft themselves)



Of course, Things greatly depend on the computer literacy of your user base as well. Most people adapt (kicking and screaming) to a newer version, but there's always people that don't understand the concept behind anything, but merely memorize all the individual steps without realizing the big picture. One menu in a different place and all of a sudden they have no idea how to do their jobs anymore. A switch from 2003 to 2007 turns into a huge ordeal with a ton of lost productivity in those cases.



The biggest problem I've seen with rolling out Vista itself is that there are just too many programs that people are using every day that simply don't work under Vista. Just a couple of quick examples: Nero 6, Quickbooks Pro 2005, WS_FTP Pro 7, Paperport 10, and many others. Not to mention PDA's that are a few years old that simply can't communicate properly with the Vista mobile device manager, but are OK with XP's ActiveSync.
Switching from XP to Vista also means having to spend sometimes hundreds of dollars in updates for other software packages and hardware peripherals (a scanner here, a PDA there, an insanely expensive badge printer here, a receipt printer there), and in many cases it's simply not worth it since Vista adds very little real benefit to the average user, other than the extra shineyness -- and the extra couple of hundred dollar pricetag in random legacy software makes it a tough sell to the bean counters.
No matter how much Microsoft tries to convince us that Vista's driver problems are yesterdays news and everything is just fantastic now, I've come across a lot of show-stoppers myself.

I personally would take Office 2007 (I recently upgraded from MS Office 1997), it took a while to get used to the new menus. There's another company sells classic style menus for Office 2007 (Addintools) ... I saw their advert them on Microsoft's website.

Office 2007's interface is measurably better and more agile than previous versions. Unfortunately, everyone who has used PC's for more than a year or two can navigate Office 2003 (and prior) menus instinctively.

They may not be very well designed, with too much clutter and little obvious relation between top-level headings and some 2nd level entries, but it works.

2007 breaks things out into nice, logical places. It will take kids only a short time to learn, but it takes us hardened users of Office (those that remember Office 97, especially) a long time to re-learn everything.

I stick with Office 2003. 2007 offers no compelling features for me.

I agree - new or casual users will like the new look.
Those of us who customized 2003 to the hilt will lose tons of productivity as they have to relearn a program that offers no real advantage (unless 'fewer useful features' is now an advantage).

Speaking of which, there's no compelling reason to move to Vista unless you like pain. Plus, the 'revolutionary' DX10 works on about 1% of games released in the last year. And I'm talking big-budget commercial games. Among indies and smaller companies, it's more like 0%.

If you like the look of Vista so much, you can always skin XP to look exactly like it. Apparently the new look is the biggest selling point for Vista.

...Except if you have a need for more than ~3GB RAM -- driver support for 64-bit XP is absolutely abyssmal.

Yeh, no you can't.

>> If you like the look of Vista so much, you can always skin XP to look exactly like it.

> Yeh, no you can't.

How about this one? - XP Theme - Vista Inpirat 2

How much customising can you do with the 'ribbon' interface?
At work I use Excel 2003 heavily. I have placed the most common icons in the toolbar area which speeds up productivity. Just a shame they don't support keyboard shortcuts (which would increase producivity even more for me)

I read in CPU mag. There was a huge article about it... They got a WinXP rig to look almost exactly like Vista... Even the transparent windows.. Google is your friend here, because Microsoft actually took down everything it could find that did that, even though it's not technically illegal... WinXP is extremely customizable - just keep looking..



Exactly nothing. WYSIWYG.



Then do not even *touch* 2007.



They don't. Microsoft apparently doesn't like that sort of thing (productivity) anymore.

@ ubergeek



You can add your favorite icons in Excel 2007 for quick access. The default position for the quick icons are just above the ribbon, but this can be also placed below. Just select the Customize Quick Access Toolbar option. Its a pull down menu next to the quick save button, or right click on the ribbon tab.

Use OpenOffice.

It took me a while but I was finally able to move the whole studio over to OpenOffice (and Thunderbird/Lightning for email/calender). Now all my machines (Win, Mac, Linux) can share documents flawlessly with no conversion needed, and yet I can still send out documents in MS Office format for those who are still slaved to it.

I cannot comprehend returning to MS Office at this point. It's just a waste of money.

O2007 is awesome. I love it.

It's a close approximation of Aero Basic, but that's it.

OpenOffice uses 2-3x as much CPU and RAM as Microsoft Office 2007, according to benchmarks (I could find them if you want). For me it loads and runs at least 3x faster, and is much more responsive. Not to mention a much better interface.

Personally I prefer Office 2007 to 2003 - I think the toolbars are very intuitive.

All this talk has made me install 2007 again, just to see how I get on. Already, I notice quite long loading times for 2007 compared to the almost instant-on of 2003 (on my ageing desktop machine).

Ive been in the industry for over 20 years now and I have to say its all change for changing sake. If a working forumla working DONT BREAK IT.

BLoat bloat and even more bloat, you cant beat a nice clean simple interface.

OpenOffice is coming along nicely and in fact new PCs' that dont require Excels' macros, is been installed on new Pcs'. Not even entertaining Vista and I have a policy that Vista is not to be installed even.

OpenOffice is great as long as you dont want to rewrite all of your VB macro stuff (although it does support VBA code doesnt transfer).

At the end of the day most users want to load a word document, do a few changes print and save, you dont need an "intuitive toolbar" todo that.....

saying all this I used to love Word Perfect and Gem Publisher (now im showing my age)

I would be intrested in seeing that. I wonder if its got something to do with runtime environment requirements on windows, because the linux version seems slick.

Yes, but that is within -the same- organization/company, and there this approach will certainly work. By the way, there is a 2007-import filter for Office 2003 available, it can be downloaded from the Microsoft website and it really works. Just in case people forget to save in the correct format. ;-)

The scenario that I had in mind is more like this: WHO working with a ministry in Ireland, one in Russia, another one in Italy, a university in Finland and a non-governmental agency in Korea and so forth. As long as I worked there, nobody ever received a document in a non-Microsoft format or in a standard format like RTF.

Office 2007 is slow in loading if you install the search service thing. Don't know what it's called but some enhanced search in outlook that installs a service that slows EVERYTHING down.

The other thing is networked printers. If you have you default printer on a network like I do, when you load a Office app windows searches the network every single time, for some reason this took what at least 15-20 seconds. So a tiny .doc file with no tetxt in would seemingly take an age to load.

In the end I chose to not have the network printer as default, having to select it at print time. Office 2007 loads way faster than 2003 so long as do this.

Here's a benchmark comparing Office 2007 to OpenOffice:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=120

I don't think it's the one I saw earlier, but it reports the same thing. And it looks like OpenOffice is even worse than I remembered - it takes 4x the memory, and >10x the CPU usage to start up with a blank file.



And people talk about MS products being bloated! That's insane. Honestly always knew OpenOffice was slow but I didn't realize how much better MS Office 2007 was until I tried it.

Also, I've used OpenOffice on Linux and it seemed no faster than on Windows. If anything, it's slower.

OpenOffice has a lot of its roots in Java, which causes bloat. I'd hate to maintain even a small part of that codebase.

I don't know why someone can't, for instance, produce a nice, simple spreadsheet program that has every one of its functions capable of being used by a scripting language. Keep it simple, and all complex functionality comes from scripts...

To be fair, John J., that blog post is 3 years old and compares MS Office 2003 with OpenOffice 2.0. We are weeks away from OpenOffice 3.0, and the current production version is 2.4.1, so that blog post isn't relevant anymore.

Still, you are right. OpenOffice does use a bit more RAM than MS Office. A recent comparison I did showed that OpenOffice Writer had a 30mb overhead above MS Word, but that was it. This overhead didn't multiply when documents were loaded. Since most modern machines run 2-4 gigabytes of RAM, I don't think anyone is going to be bothered by the extra RAM requirements. In terms of CPU usage, both were at 0% (word processors don't need much) so that wasn't an issue either.

As VinylPusher noted, OpenOffice is Java based (which is resource hungry), but this allows OpenOffice to run on Windows, Linux RPM, Linux DEB, Solaris x86, Solaris SPARC, Mac OSX Intel, and Mac OSX PPC. That is just plain awesome to be able to freely share documents with all those platforms without conversion needed.

I love that fact that all my game related documents, charts, and databases can sit in a shared folded on the server and no matter what machine I am on, I can pull those files up and work on them. I could never do that with MS Office.

It looks like that was an old one. Here's another one comparing Office 2007 with OpenOffice 2.2:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=480&tag=rbxccnbzd1

It's better - only 2-5x slower / more memory, but it's still way more bloated than it should be.


Of course it's not going to use any CPU when idle. It better not. The CPU measurements determine how much CPU is used by each program when opening identical files.

All that really matters is how long it takes to load/save files and how bloated the interface feels, and I can tell you 100% that OpenOffice is at least 3 times slower than Writer. Not only does it take forever to open, but even when saving a file, it seems to take several seconds while Word is instant. The metrics I posted simply prove this with more verifiable data.

I've used a word processor maybe 5 times in the past 12 months. I'm not a big letter writer and the only reason I've needed one recently is to do my CV.

Even though I make some reasonably heavy use of Excel, I've not hit any performance issues with it. The only real problem I have is some poorly-written macro's the IT bods at work make us use when exporting data from Access, which involve a lot of column formatting and other smartening-up of the displayed data; they forgot what 'Application.Screenupdating' is for.

Loading times area factor though. I'm lumbered with Office 2000 at work, but it does have the advantage of loading completely instantly on even my ageing P4 with 256MB RAM (even better on the quad Xeon server I remote desktop into for certain tasks).

Outlook 2007 drags its heels on the desktop machine I'm using at home right now, but some of that is to do with me accessing my Gmail through IMAP, which is never instant.

Note that you can speed up the application launch times of Open Office tremendously by turning off the Java runtime stuff in the openoffice options. (Apparently that may prevent some open office document macros from functioning, but for casual home use you wouldn't use those anyway)

also: keep in mind that the reason that Office 2003 can save its files faster than OpenOffice can in the same format, is that a word file (pre-2007) is not much more than a memory dump with a header tacked on to it, instead of a 'proper' document format. A nice side-effect of that is that a Microsoft word document can contain entirely unrelated bits of memory, and even information from different files if you happened to have worked on those earlier. Not visible in word itself, but at a binary level a word document can reveal a lot more than you might want it to...

For home use, OpenOffice is great. For corporate use, I'm sticking with MS Office 2003 + free office 2007 compatibility pack. I'm not giving up my pull-down menu's lightly...

No, when I said it saves/loads instantly, I was referring to Office 2007's XML format. Definitely a "proper" document format.

I have outlook 2007 on my main machine and 2003 on all my others. My opinions on it are quite split depending on what part of the package I am using.

Word: 2007 - Ribbon makes formatting much easier, as well as some of the quick inserts (Like start pages) are a life saver.
Excel: Indifferent but I would slightly side on 2003
Powerpoint: I don't use it to much but I think 2007 is slightly better for general presentations, however when doing not so presentational stuff (I know one shouldn't but some times it can be useful) I have prefer 2003

@john J

Interesting, i am wondering if its because it loads everything it needs in one go :/
Im not sure what hardware that test was taken but on my 2ghz celeron with oldish IDE disks it takes approx 2-3 seconds to load writer and perhaps 20-30 seconds to load a hugeish document with images. I can see from the task manager its munching about 22 megs of the bat which is approx what he got.

Still, bloat or not you cant beat cross platform, free, open document format and 60-70% as good for the "money" can ya ;)