F****ing new MS Office products are CRAP!

I’ve been (trying) to get used to Office 2007 products for a few months now, but this past week I’ve completely lost both my patience and any hope for this crappy product.

I’m not going to go into detail on what I hate about these POS, but will say I have no hope for further MS products, especially Win7… All of the changes I see in Office 2007 are nothing more than changes for the sake of changing things, made by some uneducated computer user that has little to no history in computer UI use.

[ul]
[li]20+ years of keyboard shortcuts and you, for no reason, remove them?? HUH? WTF???[/li][li]Copying text with the kb no longer works in Outlook? Huh? Why?[/li][li]Bullets and default spacing in Word now default to some moronic & useless spacing oddities?? Why???[/li][li]Fuck the ribbon, it sucks. Give me back my customizable toolbar.[/li][li]Neon blue colored windows? Do sunglasses come with this?[/li][li]File History list couldn’t be more unintuitive.[/li][li]Insert 1,0,55,34,3409 complaints here![/li][/ul]

Word 2007 is almost unusable now. Almost nothing I knew about Word, and I’ve used it since Win3.1, is useful anymore and the entire GUI is something completely foreign and unique, not following traditional UI conventions in place since, 1855.

Don’t get me started on the crap UI changes and removals made in Vista. Grrrr.

FU MS!

Sorry, I needed to vent. I’d rather smack the “engineer” responsible for these changes.

Hi there! It looks like you’re trying to write an angry forum post! Would you like some assistance?

/clippy

hmm, i found the ui changes in office 07 to be quite welcome. i was personally tired of using a word processor with an early 90’s interface.

p.s. get with the times, old man.

YOU CAN’T FUCKING TELL AN ANGRY MAN TO CALM DOWN WHEN HE IS MAD

I can understand the anger. I got used to the old Word too, and the new Word got rid of a lot of the old conventions. I don’t see a compelling reason to upgrade from Office 97 or even 2003.

The issue is that Word tries to be all things to all users, and has far too many options and is too complicated. MS should bundle a better Wordpad that is more robust for the users who want a basic word processor, and then Word could be for people who want to desktop publish or do document to HTML.

Of course they won’t ever make Wordpad better than a crippled, denuded word processor, though.

Get Open Office. It works, can do lots of things, and is free and compatible with Office. MS Office is way overpriced. I don’t see any reason to stick with it.

People sending you docx files.

The new office is pretty lame because it kernals terribly. Everything is up front, which is great, sorta. But once you want to work through shortcuts it’s happy to tell you to go to hell.

Why would you bury print preview like that? WHY?

The ribbon UI does indeed suck in Word. Visually it looks like a jumbled toybox of controls. The automatic context-sensitive switching means that it’s always switching AWAY from the one tab that I actually use 99% of the time (forcing me to manually switch back to it). And since they went with this bloated expose-everything UI metaphor, it means that any functionality they couldn’t cram onto the ribbons was unceremoniously shoveled into the horribly unintuitive “Office Button” menus.

As a non-profit, my office got a multi-user license for the entire Office 2007 suite, and I made an honest attempt to use it. Finally I had to step back down to Office 2003 because the 2007 version of Access didn’t like connecting to remote MySQL databases, and just downgrading Access created conflicts with everything else.

Rather than get into an argument about whether change is good or not, I’ll just point out a couple of solutions…

  1. Many (most?) of the old keyboard shortcuts still work. For instance, I reflexively do Alt-T W to do a word count after all of these years. Still works.

  2. You can customize the apps to put the stuff you use front-and-center. For instance, the aforementioned Print Preview in Word? Click the arrow at the right edge of the little toolbar in the top left. It brings up the “Customize Quick Access Toolbar” menu. You can put an always-present Print Preview icon (or many other commands) right at the top of the Word window.

  3. Agreed that the spacing and some other settings in Word are annoying by default. But it’s easier than ever (you used to have to edit and resave Normal.dot) to change these. Just open the Font dialog, spacing dialog, etc., make your changes, and then click the Default button to save them. Presto, saved just the way you want them.

I had the same response when I ran into the new Office on school computers. I’m so glad I’ve got Open Office, with its 90s look, for my computer!

I took a bit of time to get used to the revised interface in Office 2007 and prefer it now. The older versions of Word and the latest versions of Open Office feel a lot clunkier to me. Maybe it depends on what you’re doing, though.

Microsoft offer a free install that allows old versions of Office to read docx files. Here.

It’s one more click. (Actually, a hover.) Buried? Plus you can expose it. It also has a keyboard shortcut. (Ctrl + F2)

Office 2007 was influenced by two things that I know about: The Office 2003 customer improvement program which tracked usage anonymously, and the increasing number of feature requests for Word which were for features that already existed. While Office 2007 sometimes annoys me because I know how things used to work, in general, I find it much better to use. Microsoft made a gamble, and I think it has borne some fruit.

You’re a couple years too late for the party

I bet z22 also really hated that disgusting “Windows” product with all its glitzy graphics and inefficient mouse clicks. WordPerfect in DOS text mode was so much better!

^^ This is the only reason we’ve had to downgrade users at my company, and it’s only a small handful at that.

Most of your complaints though z22 sound like “get off my lawn” syndrome. I take it you were forced to upgrade? Because if not, Office 2003 is cheap these days. Please though, rant away sir. It helps with the pain. We all get it sometimes. However a lot of us have been using 2007 (brainwashed?) for a while now without issues.

I…I think I love you

Office 2007 is phenomenal. The ribbon interface is just awesome. I have no idea why you would swear fealty to the first style of GUI ever devised, before any research at all into what good GUI design means was conducted. But hey, whatever floats your boat.

I agree with extar here, I can’t imagine going back, particularly with the Quick Access bar so handy.

Awesome.
/golfclap

I’m supporting 2003 now (2007 won’t integrate with our document management system and we can’t upgrade that until next year) but I’ve worked with 2007 in preparation for an upgrade here in our office. Personally I like a lot of what 2007 brings to the table, especially the ability to use simple XML to customize the ribbons and the simplification of a lot of the document production tools (we’re a law firm, so we produce a metric fuckton of documents daily). On the other hand, I expect I will see a lot of the same anger in the OP from my own users once we do switch over, as the learning curve for people with a decade or more of experience with Office is pretty steep. I know the secretaries here have developed plenty of bad habbits when it comes to document production and shortcutting, and Word 2007 will not allow that to continue, so the hate will be palpable. I do not look forward to the upgrade. I may even push for skipping Office 2007 altogether and trying the next iteration instead.