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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
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Great Office Suite
I have been using the Microsoft Office products since their introduction many years ago. This upgrade (2007) looks and feels somewhat different than past versions, but once you get used to it...it is fine...even better than before because a lot of the commonly used functionality is right up front, not buried in sub-menus. The help function is much more user friendly as well.
Great Product!
Rating: 
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A DOWNGRADE from Office 2003
I recently bought a new laptop, and the changeover involved an "upgrade" to Office 2007. I was aware that there was a new user interface, but was not aware that Office 2007 is, in almost every respect, an INFERIOR product to any Office version that came before it!
I have used MS Office for many years, and am what could be called a "power user," especially for Word and Powerpoint, which I use weekly.
One of the great features of Office is that it has been totally customizable. For those who use office frequently, it has been easy to create your own custom toolbars so you have what you need easily available. Most tasks could be done with one or two mouse clicks... Until Office 2007!
In Office 2007, hardly anything is customizable! You have a constantly changing tool ribbon, which takes up a lot of screen real estate.
The ribbon presents a set of icons based on what it "thinks" you will need at the moment. It is rarely right! ... so you go searching through the tabs trying to find the icon that was on the ribbon a few moments earlier! There is one small "tool bar" up on the title bar that you CAN customize, but it is not convenient, and will not hold many icons. It has the option of being moved below the ribbon, which takes up even more screen real estate, but is still very limited, and cannot be docked or moved from there.
Granted, there are third party programs, such as Ribbon Customizer and Toolbar Toggle, that add back some of the ability to customize, but it is still far inferior to what Office users are used to!
Even the third party programs, however, cannot get around the fact that there are some features in earlier Office versions that are simply NOT included in the new one. In previous versions of Powerpoint, you could add a set of icons that, with one mouse click, allowed you to adjust the vertical spacing of text. That has been omitted in 2007. In the "improved" 2007 version, you must open a dialog box, and make several mouse clicks to adjust vertical spacing!
To make matters worse, Office 2007 documents are not compatible with earlier versions. After spending years establishing formats such as .doc and .ppt as industry standards, Microsoft has introduced a version of office that does not use these formats! If you want to send a document to someone who still has Office 2003 (or any other program that reads .doc files) you need to remember to save it in that format. The default 2007 format cannot be opened by earlier versions!
Office 2007 CAN open the older formats, but even in opening earlier Office formats, there are problems. For example, most users of Powerpoint have learned the trick of adding drop shadows behind the text to make the text stand out on the screen. Office 2007 has changed the way these shadows are formed. When you open a powerpoint presentation made on an earlier version, your old drop shadows WILL NOT ANIMATE with the text. When a slide appears, the shadows of the letters are already in place, and the letters animate in on top! Mircosoft's only suggestion... go through your slides and take the old shadows out, and put new shadows in! (I tried this... it takes 30-40 minutes per presentation! ...And I have hundreds of powerpoint presentations in my file!)
For someone who never used Office before, or who just uses Word to type simple letters, 2007 may be okay, but for anyone who depends on Office for detailed tasks and productivity, 2007 is a nightmare.
I have always loved Microsoft Office. It has been an industry standard for ease of use. In my opinion, that is no longer the case. I believe Microsoft tried to produce something "different" to attract new users, but in the process totally ignored the needs of those who have used their products in the past. If you have the option of staying with an earlier version, DO NOT UPGRADE to this product!
Rating: 
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How do I open the box?
I am a fairly well educated person who is handy around the house. It took a 25 minute call with Microsoft customer support to get the box open. Customer support had to pull up a diagram and walk me through 18 steps.
Rating: -
I won't be upgrading to Office 2007 now...
The company I work for has upgraded to Office 2007, so I figured I'd upgrade at home to be compatible. After reading all the reviews here, I've decided to wait and not upgrade at home until I have to - hoping maybe with all these issues, my employer will call a halt and go back to 2003!
I've used Office 2007 at the office for about 2 weeks now, and after getting used to the new Ribbon feature, I actually like the new interface. I agree with one review here that said the ribbon is too large, though. It would be nice to be able to resize it.
The major reason I am not upgrading at home is all the reports of Office 2007 being slow, and corrupting files created in Version 2003. I have been having these problems at work, but thought the issues were due to a network problem. The most annoying slow problem is pasting things from one document to another, even within the same application (Word to Word or Excel to Excel). It's not just a little slow... it is agonizingly slow! I have taken to moving on to other tasks while I wait for Word or Excel to paste, and then go back to the document later. I'm relieved to know this isn't actually our company's network problem, but it has convinced me NOT to upgrade at home.
As far as the file corruption problem, I have experienced having to reformat bullets and other things due to the new interface in a few small files, but shudder at the scale of the time it will take for my larger files. I pity my employer having to pay for my extra time wasted in this kind of clean up work. I have also experienced the problems mentioned with Outlook not being able to recognize your email folders. Again I thought this was a network problem at the office, and didn't realize it was the Office 2007 upgrade doing it. I plan to back up all my email folders as soon as I get to work on Monday as I dread having a glitch and losing all my saved emails!
The other annoying thing about the new Outlook interface is something also previously mentioned here - the change in use and display of "flags" and "categories". In 2003 I had an extensive system set up using the various flag colors, which is now completely lost due to the color system being moved from flags to categories. ARGH!!!!!
Thanks to the reviewers here for your input and giving me the benefit of your trials and tribulations with the software.
Rating: -
Completely unbelievable!
I bought this product because I needed a new laptop and of course it has the awful Vista on it. I haven't even tried to tackle anything other than Outlook yet and I'm already completely fed up. I spent many hours trying to find solutions for all of the glitches Outlook has and it still doesn't work. I'm having problems with it that people have had for over a year and it's still not working properly. If I could return everything I just purchased and buy an Apple, I would.
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