Win7 and Office 2007

[claidheamhmor]

I installed Windows 7 (the release version) on my work PC, my work laptop, and my home PC a couple of weeks ago. So far, I've been impressed; it's working as I expected, and seems to have fixed the awful Office 2007 bug I had experienced on my work PC. Driver support is excellent; the only thing I've had an issue with is my Canon LiDE scanner, of all things; I did get it working, but it's a workaround.

For my assignments, I've been doing quite a bit of work in Word 2007, but also in Visio and Powerpoint 2007. Frankly, I'm not impressed. Word is more than capable for handling day to day documents, but its style support is still flaky and unpredictable, bullets and numbering is still broken (those issues have existed in every version of Word for Windows), and document layout is still quite crude and somewhat unpredictable (for example, I could lay a document out, with page breaks, images, etc., and not be 100% sure that when I reopened the document that everything would be where it was supposed to).

As for Visio and Powerpoint: both are easy enough to use, but I found myself using a mixture of both because neither on its own had the features to do everything I needed. Back in the early 1990s I used to support the Micrografx products, including the Micrografx presentation package, Charisma, and the flowcharter, ABC Flowcharter (at the time, the market leader). I fail to understand why products from 15 years ago were more full-featured in many ways, and easier too, than Microsoft's latest. Has "office" software really reached a features dead-end? Microsoft's stellar office packages are Excel and Outlook; the rest are really not best of breed.

Comments

[polymale.livejournal.com]

Perhaps Office 2010 will be better? Isn't the beta out already?

Which Win7? 32-bit or 64-bit?

[claidheamhmor]

I think 2010 may be out, but I haven't checked the feature list yet.

I'm running 32-bit for the moment; I'll give 64-bit a try sometime.

[suibhne-geilt.livejournal.com]

Word still suffers from trying too hard. MS needs to decide whether it's a professional-level program for serious creation of complex documents, or something for the average user.

If they want to make it pro-level, put the energy into fixing the bullets & numbering, and the object placement (which I find positively infuriating the way it randomly changes the user-selected settings...). Then take out the attempts to assume what the user is trying to do. If they stripped down the automatic options, created a leaner program, it'd be much more stable when handling large documents with graphics, and more user friendly.

If they want Word to be a good word processor for the average user, they could probably dump 75% of the features, and again, create a lean, user-friendly program.

But really, when I have to use Word on the job as a tech writer, I'd be much more productive and quicker if Word would admit that I do know what I'm doing, and just simply follow my instructions without some code trying to constantly second-guess me.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

I agree entirely. I still use Word Perfect for documents I initiate myself, though much of the time I end up converting them to Word so I can share them with co-workers and integrate others' work. I haven't yet found a function in Word that isn't simpler in Word Perfect, and I really like being able to "reveal codes" and see just what I'm doing to my text.

[claidheamhmor]

I must reinstall WordPerfect sometime; I always loved it, and it was always so totally precise. And yes, WP's "gates" method with reveal codes works so much better than Word's "paint-on" formatting.

[claidheamhmor]

Agreed, totally. And yes, the object placement is really annoying; I can never trust Word to keep things where I put them.

[gsl.livejournal.com]

I've played a little around with W7, and like what I have seen so far, having installed it both on my laptop and my GFs computer.
Only issue I had was taking a backup of my HD pre-W7, it wouldn't allow me to put the files I wanted onto a USB-stick, I had to burn it to a DVD-ROM, but when I tried restoring it afterwards, an option to restore from DVD was unavailable... That may be a bug with Acers software though, we got 2 DVDs delivered, one with W7 and the other with necessary drivers and such.
Hopefully I'll be able to afford a new computer around new years, so I look forward to working more with W7.
I also had some issues around my GFs scanner/copier/printer, since HP didn't have scanner software that supported W7, but the software that was provided with W7, MS scanner and fax (IIRC) worked.

[claidheamhmor]

It's amazing how good the built-in driver support in W7 is, I must say.

[prof818.livejournal.com]

The numbering/bulleting system is really messed up in word. But you can get it right. It just takes a lot of patience. Perhaps they should do some kind of way for the user to link the elements together...

[claidheamhmor]

You can get the bullets and numbering right, but the moment you change something, it all falls apart again. *sigh* My personal bugbear is that it's so horribly inconsistent with formatting of the bullets/numbering; if you, for example, make the first word or two of the line bold, sometimes the bullet or number is also made bold, and sometimes not, but there's no consistency in it, and sometimes it simply cannot be changed.