Just as some advice, we created what we referred to as a “Tiger Team” who were comprised of a handful of users from each operational area, site, and function. They joined a series of calls about the product, did an initial 3 month test, and then were some of the cheerleaders/experts we had available when we did the full deployment. In addition, Microsoft has a series of free video’s available online that helped a number of users.
Why does the Great Satan have to change shit around all the time, eh?
Openoffice FTW!
I actually like the new 2007 office stuff.
Excellent idea, thanks!
I may modify it somewhat for my office though and hand-pick my own Cougar Team. Grrrrrowl…
Same with me - as someone who if working with Word documents most of my day, I much prefer Office 2007. In fact, it’s the only Office upgrade that I’ve EVER liked, but it adds a lot of good stuff, including the superior UI (once you get over the initial learning curve).
The track changes/compare documents feature is finally robust enough to be useful for legal documents as well, so that alone made it a crucial upgrade for me.
The Quick Access bar is a half-assed substitute for the old custom toolbars, and you know it. The ribbon is Office for Dummies, no matter how much people may try to sugarcoat this fact. It commits the oft-repeated UI design blunder of making common tasks slightly more accessible, while making everything else a pain in the ass.
At least in the old UI, pretty much all the functionality, both common and uncommon, was equally accessible. Stuff that used to be available right from the menus is now hidden in those tiny little unlabeled buttons in the corners of the ribbon buttons, or buried in the vast wasteland of the “Word Options” uber-dialog.
Want to recheck the spelling for a document? You’d think that would be under the “Review” tab, right? Alas, no… you have to dig into Office Button -> Word Options -> Proofing -> Recheck Document to access this very basic feature.
Want to set a password for the document? Well, the Developer tab has a Protect Document feature… that seems intuitive enough, right? Wrong. That launches a completely unrelated DRM feature new to Office 2007. To set a document password, you have to do Office Button -> Save As -> Tools -> General Options (don’t allow yourself to be tempted by “Save Options”!). How in the HELL is that intuitive?
Also, I hate the way Word 2007 does proportional font kerning. It seems to continually vary the width of space characters depending on what characters are to the left and right of them. Sometimes it looks like there’s no space at all, and sometimes it looks like there’s two of them. It’s maddening.
Hahaha, I love it. I should have thought of a Cougar team. Damn it … at least I have something to think of for Windows 7 deployment now.
Let me join the chorus of people who think that the 2007 suite was a big upgrade from 2003 interface wise and made a lot of things easier. I’m not much of a power user though, I can go days between firing up word docs sometimes so I’m not the guy who had every shortcut and menu memorized and now has to relearn a lot.
Spellcheck is actually conveniently on the review tab.
Not sure what you mean by “recheck” though, so maybe you’re talking about something else, other than clicking spell-check repeatedly.
You are the target demographic for Office 2007.
When you spell-check a Word document, for god-only-knows reason it remembers that it’s done this, and simply refuses to check the spelling again if you ask it to. It is sometimes useful to do this… for example, to see which words you previously asked it to skip or ignore. So short of copying and pasting the entire document into a new Word doc, you have to tunnel down into the aforementioned Recheck option.
The entire concept of the ribbon is fundamentally flawed. An old saw about UI design is that users only utilize 10% of the functionality of your program… but it’s a different 10% for each user. Yet in the ribbon they have basically chosen to present 10% of the functionality of Word on big friendly buttons, but with the rest of the functionality made significantly less accessible than it was before. And then in a supreme act of hubris, eliminated the classic interface entirely.
zylon is such an angry user
It’s funny because it’s true.
I’m starting to think you’re just bad at using computers. Do you know that there are different ribbons, each one of which groups different functions together?
It sounds to me like you are are angry that there isn’t a “do weird hacky thingy because I want to use this product in a unintended way” ribbon.
Yeah, I have a job where I go through hundreds of pages of documents daily (whee!), but in 20 years, I’ve never needed to recheck an already spell-checked document, so I guess I am the target audience since I never noticed an issue.
Why wouldn’t you just hit “ignore once” if you had a word you weren’t sure you wanted to spell-check? Or if it’s one you use regularly, why wouldn’t you add it to your dictionary? Why would you ever hit “ignore all” if you’re doing a spellcheck, anyway - that’s asking the program to “not do” what you just asked it to do, spellcheck. Can’t remember those words if you wanted to retrieve them again? Or you could pull up your immediately preceding draft on the exceptional occasions where you couldn’t?
It just doesn’t seem to be a feature that would ever be relevant - I’m amazed it’s offered at all, I guess, even if you don’t find it as accessible as you’d like. To me, it seems like complaining that the golf ball dispenser has an inconvenient location at the basketball stadium.
For those of us who actually took the time to understand and use the full features of the product the ribbon is a disaster.
It’s great for finding stuff, but it kernals for shit.
What about this scenario:
In document A, which is from a long time customer, the acronym NIN is commonly used so you added it to your dictionary. But in a document where you spelled NIN but meant NON, should that require a re-checking? The only reason I mention that is because when I had a position at JPL, it was acronym heaven, and sometimes the acronym you used today was not one you wanted to use tomorrow.
Yeah, Open Office was already mentioned. I like how it slavishly mimics the older Office interface instead of trying to improve on it.
I don’t find that to be true at all. I’m an expert-level Word user and a monkey-level Excel user, but I find both programs to be better with the Ribbon. With Excel, I can now find out how to do the things I never could manage before; with Word, the things I always had to pull up from the bowels of the UI (style management stuff, especially) are now front and center.
The Ribbon isn’t a perfect UI, but it’s light years better than the toolbar/menu/sidebar/wizard mish-mash it replaces.