I have been using Microsoft’s 2007 version of their office suite for a little over six months now and while i have managed to become accustomed to some parts of the “ribbon” there are other parts where it is sheer torture to use for anybody with a good working knowledge of the older version.
One example of this is inserting a table of contents. After clicking on the “Insert” tab and looking over the available options I discovered that it is not on the insert bar. You need to go to the reference bar to find it. Once there it is easy enough to add a table of contents using the appropriate button but how do we then format the table? I have not yet found out as I have not delved too deeply into the system.
I tend to take the path of least resistance and just accept the defaults. The only clue that I have found so far is to toggle the fields but that seems to be a lot of work for little return. It would be nice if the user could change the table of contents so that the main headings were not split from the sub headings for that chapter. It is probably possible but it should be easier.
Headings are easier and one thing which I have found better is that Microsoft have finally woken up to the fact that many documents use appendices and made it simpler to implement them in your document. This makes my life a lot easier when I am writing reports as I use appendices a lot.
Headers and footers are a different story. What happened to the old style of page numbering where you could put in the page number followed by the total number of pages? If it is still there I can’t find it. With the old version it was simple but the wizards in the new version left it out completely.
Another problem is with images in the header. I have a documents which have logos in the headers and for some reason after placing the logo I cannot now select it to move it at all. What is happening with that?
Mail merge is fairly easy though formatting the results of the merge as currency or dates and times requires that the fields be changed by hand. Why can’t we just have an option to keep the formatting of the original data? Most of my merges are from Excel in any case so it should be easy enough.
One of the problems that I had with the old versions has still not been fixed in the new suite. Captions can be placed above or below figures and tables from the right-click menu. The only problem is that they are not stable. Make some major changes to your document and the captions can become divorced from the images and show up a couple of paragraphs away. I wish they would fix this.
Outlook is slow to load and creaky when loaded. It is also a mathematical imbecile with different percentage numbers showing up in the status bar and the send receive details. Often both are wrong. With four email accounts set up when 5 send/receive actions are completed I have seen the status bar showing 25% complete and the send receive details showing 75%. It makes you wonder if we can really trust Excel to work out our formulas.
The status bar is particularly stupid. Sending one email can show sending message 4 of 4! Where did the other three come from? One of my pet bugs in all versions of Outlook that I have used to date is the send receive details dialogue. Why does Outlook always show sending from every account even when you have absolutely no email being sent? Can’t one of their developers fix this?
I am also heartily sick and tired of seeing the popup in the task tray telling me that an Outlook file did not close correctly and is being checked. Microsoft admit to problems for .pst files around 2GB in size. Mine is less than 500 MB but I still get this more than half the time. I sincerely hope that SP1 for Office 2007 fixes this.
Excel 2007 adds some nicer chart formatting options, particularly on 3D charts. The blends and rounded corners can look really nice but getting the chart in the first place seems much more fiddly. My biggest problem came with the changes to pivot tables but I have managed to get over that. The other changes don’t seem all that difficult to get used to compared to Word.
There are some office addins available to bring back the traditional menu systems. This is fine but I used to customize the menus in Office 2003 so that many functions which I regularly used were only a click away. I know it is possible to customize the ribbons, if you are an XML guru. The little bar that is left for us to customize is not enough for me. In a CAD program that I own you can add fly-outs to the menus. What is wrong with Microsoft that they cannot seem to implement this, even if they had to release a suite for power users to do so?
I use NotePad++ for text editing and HTML quite a lot. This is a freeware program but one thing which I like is that the save button is grayed out until there are changes in the document. It would be nice to see this feature on all software, particularly software that costs a considerable sum of money as Office does.
I did change back to Office 2003 for a while. The one thing that made me reinstall Office 2007 is an add-on. The save as PDF works brilliantly with tables of contents becoming clickable bookmarks and all links working well, albeit that they open in a web browser by default, even links to other PDF files and images. The images I don’t mind so much but PDF in a browser can bring your computer to its knees.
That said I still like love the way that the save as PDF works. I had always used Adobe Acrobat Pro before but with Office 2007 the output has been repaginated compared to the original Word document if you convert to PDF rather than just printing to Distiller. I don’t know if that is Adobe or Microsoft but it shouldn’t happen. There is also the time factor. A 200 page document being converted to PDF using Adobe Acrobat gives you time to make and drink a cup of coffee. The save as PDF is much quicker.
I have heard Microsoft Office 2007 being referred to by colleagues as “Office for Idiots” and they are not too far wrong. The bells and whistles are more accessible to newcomers and people who are barely computer literate but power users generally complain about it, especially those who have used the older versions for a long time.
One thing which the ribbon bar has done is to make things easier for people who format documents like a fifth grader, with different fonts and colours for all of the styles. The styles being on the ribbon are not a big help for those of us who used to keep all of the styles open in the right sidebar. How many documents have you received with more than 100 styles used? I have lost count as most people just change the fonts and colours etc using the left side of the “Home” tab on the ribbon.
One thing that Microsoft could do is to change the home ribbon and leave out the font changing stuff from that side. Instead just leave it where it should be, in the customize styles section. This would at least save me from having to see documents with really wild formatting.
Another thing that should be done is to have a wizard that pops up whenever somebody uses more than one carriage return and explains to people how to use the paragraph spacing options. This could also be done for tabs or indents when multiple spaces are used.
The menu changes after the old menu was used in three prior versions are a big step. Microsoft should seriously consider adding the option of using the newer ribbon style or going back to the traditional menus, even if the option must be selected at install time.
While I am not an Office guru, I do use quite a lot of functions that most people never see. The simpler ribbon bar may be fine for them but I still have issues with it, even after regular use for more than six months. I am sure that I cannot be the only one. Are you listening Microsoft?
Tags: Acrobat, Adobe, CAD, HTML, menu systems, Microsoft, microsoft office 2007, ribbon interface, web browser, XML
