Last weekend I upgraded my work laptop to Windows Vista (Ultimate edition) and Office 2007 Professional (I believe these are actually released ‘officially’ to business customers tomorrow (30th Nov), but I got the RTM copy fro MSDN Subscriber Downloads.
Anyway, the Vista install went very well – nice and easy, no issues with drivers etc, so I was pretty pleased with that.
The Office 2007 install was as easy as you would expect,pop the DVD in, select some options and wait 20 minutes while it coies all the files over.
After a couple of hours playing around ith the OS (getting dasBlog working, installing all my usual apps and what have you) there were a few annoyances (OK, I’m just not used to the ‘new way’ yet so I get annoyed that it takes me longer to do things – I’m an impatient git)…
I didn’t spend lot of time with Office 2007 until getting back into the office on Monday. I have now been using it in anger for 3 days and I’m not really impressed at all. Trying to be objective – I don’t think it’s just because of the UI changes (ribbon bar etc) meaning that I don’t know where to find it (off the top of my head) – I really think that the ribbon bar is going to be a flop…
I’m a power user, I usually find software easily ‘discoverable’, but I find myself ‘lost’ in the ribbon bar. It is supposed to give easy and quick access to the commonly used features of the application – take Word for example, if I’m typing a document then one of the most likely things I’m going to do is print it, yet there is no print button, initially I could not find it at all – at a guess I clicked the orb and horrah it brought up a menu (where I then found Print, Send To, Save As – all my commonly used functions).
Maybe my complaint is not that the ribbon bar is bad, just that the items they have decided to place on he ribbon bar and the buttonns they decide to display based on context are wrong (or at least wrong for me).
Here is a screenshot of my ribbon bar – it covers three lines / rows and also looks like double spacing between the lines / rows (so I lose four lines / rows to button now – Word 2003 took two) but look at the style section – it takes up about 40% of the available ribbon bar for something rarely used (by me at least).
I do like the context toolbar that appears beside text or other objects in the document as you work on it. So, your typing text, you select a word, line, paragraph or whatever and a little opaque toolbar appears with some ‘common’ options on it. Mine appeared with Bold, Center, Italic, Font Name, Font Size, Font Increase, Font Decrease, Text Color, Highlight Color, Block Indent and Block Unindent. The one thing I was looking for, Underline, was not in there….
I think (??) that it is supposed to be self learning, so we’ll see how it goes, but from the last three days my productivity is down about 20%.