Win7 and Office 2007
Sunday, 29 November 2009 23:03![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
claidheamhmorI 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.
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.