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Microsoft Office 2007 users, your opinions are wanted

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cthorpe:
I have used all of the major iterations of Office since 97 due to licensing agreements with the University my wife and I are affiliated with.  I recently picked up Office 2007 Enterprise edition for a mere $20 (and yes, like Darwin's faculty license, it is a 100% legit).  I find that it just works.  I can load any of the applications in less than 5 seconds (though I am on an extremely fast PC), and I love the live previews as you scroll through options.  I have found the ribbon to be rather intuitive, and I rarely have to search for more than a few minutes to find some option that I haven't used in 2007 yet.  Once I find it, it makes sense to me why it is located where it is in the ribbon, so I don't have to hunt for it again.

I did run into a nasty bug the other day, however, but it may have been a combination of Office and Vista rather than just Vista.  After a couple of weeks worth of daily use, I suddenly found that when attempting to double click on any files saved in older Office format (doc, ppt, etc), Office would tell me that it was not installed for the current user and that I should run setup again.   I could start all of the applications from the start menu with no problem, as well as double clicking on any file that was saved in the new Office 2007 format (docx, pptx, etc).  Running setup did nothing to solve the problem, nor did Office's repair or diagnostic functions.  I never did solve the problem under Vista.  Instead, I finally found all of the XP drivers I needed for my machine and installed XP.  Office 2007 is back to running perfectly fine.

zridling:
Wow, thanks for all the feedback. Here's a follow-up: Are any of you using Office 2007 in the workplace? (Rover mentioned Outlook '07 at work.)

J-Mac:
Sadly, Zaine, I no longer have a "workplace"!   :(

I can say, though, that not many companies have upgraded to Office 2007 yet. At least not as many as Microsoft would like.  Corporations are usually slow to upgrade their office suites.  Office 2007 upgrades are priced exceedingly high, despite the comments by many here about the academic discounts. That is, for personal consumers, home users, etc.  I know that corporations with multi-seat licenses get fairly substantial discounts, and I am virtually certain that Microsoft is discounting it even more deeply now because of the relatively slow sales. But for large corporations, it is the training costs that are prohibitive. While the software purchase itself is a capital expense, the staff training is not - it is an O&M expense item and does not get the beneficial tax treatment that new software purchases get.  And the training for Office 2007 is much more intensive than previous upgrades to Office. When I was in the business, we had an abundance of administrative personnel who were not overly "computer literate" except for the specific applications(s) that were required for their jobs.  So working through such a drastic UI change can be a true killer from a productivity standpoint! You'll see some secretaries in tears struggling for hours to get a report typed that would have taken them a few minutes previously.

I think that all will eventually settle in with the new version, but not for quite a while. Of course I may be way off here, but I don't think so.   8)

Jim

Darwin:
My employer is in the process of switching from Office 2003 to Office 2007... Haven't actually seen any machines with it installed, yet, but the changeover is scheduled to be completed mid-April.

cthorpe:
My workplace is 100% Mac with Office 2004.

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