All I want to know is, why doesn’t CONTROL+INSERT put highlighted text into the clipboard buffer in Outlook 2007?
Yes, I admit, I was just venting. Instead of smashing my computer with my RockBand guitar, I peacefully went to sleep.
Is that Bill D.'s baby pic?
Since we’re into the crass generalization phase of the thread, I will add mine.
Only people who fear change and hate when stuff they’ve worked to learn by heart is move around actually dislikes the ribbon.
Clever people invented it and for new users (the people who by the new Office instead of just sticking with the fully functional version they allready own) it’s much easier to use and learn.
For those of us happy not to still be using 16 colour WordPerfect it’s also an improvement… unfortunately our IT-department is in the aforementioned category.
I write and edit for a living and I like the improvement when I return home to Office 2007.
What on earth are you talking about? Under Word 2003, you could manage everything to do with styles from the Styles pane.
Under Word 2007, they actually removed the option to modify multilevel lists directly from the Styles pane. Instead you have to select the list you want to modify within the document, then click on the Multilevel List button on the Home tab, then select the counter-intuitively named “Define New Multilevel List”.
Or, y’know, people who’ve found that it now takes MORE clicks to get the same amount of work done. Just another example-- Under all previous versions of Word, the basic formatting toolbar is always visible. Under 2007, the oh-so-helpful context-sensitive tab switching is continually hiding it. Want to edit the headers or footers? Poof… you’re now looking at the “Design” ribbon. You then have to manually click back to the “Home” ribbon if you want to do any formatting that isn’t available from the right-click menu.
I don’t think people who don’t care for Office 2007 deserve the insults being hurled around here.
I stumbled upon a new reason to hate Word 07 yesterday. We send forms to volunteers written in Word, with Word text form fields and check boxes. It works great for most of them. Unfortunately, though, Word 07 has done away with the forms toolbar. Here’s the bullshit you have to go through to get forms working in 07:
First go to Office button > Word Options > Popular and check the box for “Show
Developer tab in the Ribbon”. Click OK.On the Developer tab, in the Controls group, the fourth button in the bottom row
is Legacy Tools. You’ll find the items from the Forms toolbar in there, along
with what used to be on the Control Toolbox toolbar.The Protect Document button, which is further to the right on the Developer tab
and also on the Review tab, opens the Protect Document task pane. If you want
the lock icon that simply toggles forms protection on and off, you can add that
to the Quick Access Toolbar through the Customize dialog (right-click the Quick
Access Toolbar and choose Customize).
Why ask barely computer-literate volunteers to go through that crap to use a feature that was useful enough not to be relegated to a hack?
So I’ve now converted our 22-page Word forms to fill-in-able PDF for those who have the “new and improved” Office 2007. Those are four hours of my life I won’t get back.
Have to admit that I’m struggling with Access 2007 at the moment, though moving back from .NET/SQL server to VBA and Access is enough to reduce most people to tears, just extending the .NET framework into VBA would be nice and the Ribbon thingy just adds that extra level of complexity to proceedings at the moment. I’m also not quite sure why it insists on listing my queries and forms multiple times. I’m guess it’s grouping it under the tables that they reference, but it seems a silly way to do it to me. Grouping Tables under Queries under Forms seems a more logical order to me but I honest dont see what was wrong with a tab for Tables, Queries, Forms and modules. Macros should just burn in hell for they are evil incarnate.
I think I can see what it’s doing, but I’d really like a “developer” option on the ribbon doodah or something so I can more easily get to the things I actually need. But I’m going to persevere with it and I’ve got an entire weekend to play with it so hopefully I’ll start to get my head around it then.
The rest of it is fine. I’m a letter writing, account filing Office user other wise and I like the new stuff in Word, except tables which seem to be buried under ninety million layers of guff just to allow me to format my Address in comparison to “old” word but what they heck, I hated Windows '95 UI and the first thing I do with XP is still to turn off the Disney colour scheme and cartoon bubble UI so give it 10 years and I’m sure I’ll start to come round and like the new stuff that bit more.
I’ve found the Search Commands plug-in to be indispensable. It adds a tab to the ribbon that lets you search for any function, which is often a lot quicker and easier than digging through the new menus to find whatever you’re looking for.
Awesome, sign me up! I use Vim, but some “Office Retraining” would probably be good for me anyway.
What I don’t understand is why you guys don’t all upgrade to a Real Editor, say Vim or Emacs, and avoid such issues. ;-P
Or you could just double-click in the header/footer area of the page. The same way you’ve been able to for, I dunno, the last bajillion versions of Word.
Are there any good “Office 2007 for die-hard old-school Office users” resources (books, websites, etc.)? Looks like we’ll be upgrading to 2007 at work soon and I’d like to start prepping my ossified brain for the transition. Thanks!
Well it’s open sourced and always being updated. If you have some ideas maybe you should talk about them on the forums where the people who make changes go. Or maybe spend some time programming them in.
Or you could just bitch about something totally free on an unrelated forum.
Or we could just point out that people recommending OO.o for its awesome and elegant UI are insane.
I’ve used Open Office and appreciate the work that goes into it and I understand why they would want to mimic the Microsoft Office UI since that’s what most people are familiar with. But if the choice is between doing something familiar versus doing something better, why not choose better? I highly doubt the people coding Open Office are unaware of these things and I don’t use OO enough to invest the time to detail to the team working on it how to make changes that I think would improve it. I use Office 2007 because for me it’s already better than OO and previous versions of MS Office.
I was sad about having to switch off of WordPerfect to Word, which I only did around 1999. There’s stuff about that program that I still miss - convenient columns feature, reveal codes. Word’s columns feature still sucks.
Because “better” is subjective and familiarity is obviously pretty important to a lot of folks – including you, Ned. For example, do you use a QWERTY keyboard or a Dvorak keyboard? Probably QWERTY. Why? Because even though Dvorak is generally considered “better”, you grew up with QWERTY and it gets the job done. (And if you’re the one guy on the planet who uses Dvorak, I think you’ll still understand my point.)
My group at Ubi recently upgraded to Office 2007 and most people here (myself included) dislike the new interface a great deal. We felt that 2003 was just fine. Our jobs keep us busy enough without having to worry about re-learning Office programs that, in the end, don’t make us any more productive.
Even as a former print journalist who used Word a lot over a 10-year stretch, I’ve yet to stumble on an Office 2007 interface change that would have saved me much time or made my job a lot easier.
-Vede
Yeah, of course “better” is largely subjective. I was just stating my opinion, not presenting it as The Truth.
That IS what I do. And when you do this, Office 2007 automatically switches away from the Home tab. Why am I noticing a common trend of the most vocal Ribbon defenders being the ones with the worst reading comprehension?
More hilarity… the formerly instantly accessible “About” dialog is now buried under (can anybody guess? no?)… Office Button -> Word Options -> Resources -> About.
anyone know why Excel 07 is just blank when loading up 03 spreadsheet XLS files UNTIL you press the Office orb or press Alt-F? The screen is blank and suddenly displays the worksheet when you do this.
Per my earlier post, do you use a QWERTY keyboard, Ned? :-)
If so, there’s the answer to your question about why people don’t always pick “better” and why it’s often silly and largely hypocritical to grief people who prefer the “worse” option.
-Vede
Yeah, I really don’t want to relearn an interface, especially when I am content to use maybe 20% of the features.
I actually prefer to draft in Wordpad just because it’s so uncluttered. When I’m just trying to get the words right, I don’t need 10,000 options to sort through. Word suffers from a lot of bloat.