Microsoft Goes Back To Bad Old Ways With Office 2007
I just installed Microsoft Office 2007. I’m not going to write a full review. Rather, I’m simply going to highlight a few of the really important things I uncovered in my first hour of using the software: good and bad.
The Good
It’s really easy to use. It took me only about hour to get really productive in the new Word and PowerPoint, which are the two Office apps I use most often, most deeply.
The new “ribbon” user interface, coupled with instant live previews of all style changes make it easier than ever to create good looking documents.
The Bad
Word 2007 is not backwards compatible with previous versions of Word - it can’t even read in .doc format (Word 97-2003) documents properly. Word 2007 screwed up the formatting of the very first old .doc format Word document I opened up. This was a relatively simple document with tables, and a few different styles of text. For information OpenOffice opened this document correctly.
PowerPoint 2007 is not backwards compatible with previous versions of PowerPoint. If you try to save your good-looking new Powerpoint presentation in a file format compatible with previous versions of PowerPoint, it simple saves everything as uneditable images.
PowerPoint 2007 lets you create some impressive-looking slide-shows easily. As a result, I found myself immediately looking for export options for these - I had really expect Microsoft to take advantage of this excellent authoring environment with some powerful export options e.g to Flash or even WPF/E. It’s such an obviously useful thing to do (OpenOffice has had Flash export for years). However, PowerPoint does not offer any such export options.
Excel 2007 doesn’t have the “live preview” feature for changes to styles and colours (of charts). The “live preview” for changes is one of the best new features of Word and PowerPoint, I think - it’s a shame they didn’t implement this for Excel.
Conclusion
Microsoft has gone back to its bad old ways with Office 2007, by making Office 2007 documents incompatible with previous versions of Office. That means - if everyone you work with uses Office 2007, then it’ll probably be great. However, if you’re working with people that use older versions of Office, you can expect problems: both in terms of looking at documents they send you; and in terms of them looking at documents you send.
Overall, I can’t say I’ve been left with a particularly positive first impression of Office 2007. That’s not to do with the new user interface and new functionality, which is all great. Rather, it’s about issues with backwards compatibility: we work with, and support, companies that need to communicate with different organisations by using Office documents. I can already see that Office 2007 is going to be making our life more difficult in the coming months and years. The file-format incompatibility issues with Office 2007 compared to previous versions of Office mean that there’s a huge opportunity here for the OpenOffice team, if they can up their game a bit.
Bottom line: I’ll probably try sticking with Office 2007 for a while, but am prepared for downgrading to the previous version if it causes too many problems.
Dr Dox’ Computer Clinic » Blog Archive » Windows vs Mac - Read Our Verdict on 19 Sep 2007 at 11:43 pm
[...] from Microsoft. Did you know that Office can’t natively even read some of Microsoft’s older DOC files? I hope you don’t have important documents dating back a decade or so. Or want to keep [...]