Word 2007....crap!!

[tomeriker]

Just wanted to drop a line to anyone considering using Word 2007 instead of OpenOffice.

I recently was called over to a friends house to help him with a tiny little problem. He had upgraded from Word 2003 to 2007 and was trying to edit some of his documents. (WRONG) Aparently, microsoft isn't even compatible with its own software..

He was trying to make some changes to a resume'. Every time he changed something, it screwed up the format of the document.

I use OpenOffice and had no clue how to help him. I have used Word 2003 but this version didn't offer some key things like the ability to highlight a paragraph, cut and paste it in another location on the page. At least I couldn't figure it out.


I understand that I am not an expert, but damn, how is a beginner supposed to figure this out, and he does know how to use the program.

[danbuter]

2007 does not work with the .doc format. Thank you, forced obsolescence.

[tomeriker]

I was hoping that was the case. I really didn't think it was that I couldn't work the program.

It really sucks for people that upgrade not knowing that and will have to retype all their docs.

Or find a way to reformat.

thanks for the info

[bidi]

Well, no offence, but danbuter is way off base. All you have to do is tell it to save as a .doc. The default format is .docx, yes, but that doesn't mean it isn't compatible with older version. Heck, I have to use this function at work all the time since I can't open .docx at home.

Not to mention, MS now offers .docx capability to Office 2003. If there's one thing that I'll give to MS is that they were really on top of this issue. Granted they completely butchered Office 2007 with that stupid menu structure, at least they are not only backward compatible, but they made their old format forward compatible too.

[Agent-X]

I'm going to have to say the following:

1. I was trained in Microsoft Office a long time ago.
2. I hate the newest Microsoft Office, because it took me six minutes to figure out how to turn something into APA and MLA format.
3. HTML still seems better than .* any day.

Seriously, the idea of the toolbar totally vanished in MSOffice 2007.
I saw a bunch of eyecandy that was unproductive and unorganized.
I hated it.

[danbuter]

Well, no offence, but danbuter is way off base. All you have to do is tell it to save as a .doc. The default format is .docx, yes, but that doesn't mean it isn't compatible with older version. Heck, I have to use this function at work all the time since I can't open .docx at home.

Not to mention, MS now offers .docx capability to Office 2003. If there's one thing that I'll give to MS is that they were really on top of this issue. Granted they completely butchered Office 2007 with that stupid menu structure, at least they are not only backward compatible, but they made their old format forward compatible too.

Well, guess I was wrong on that one. I know several people who have had issues with old .docs and trying to do stuff with them in 2007. They were just telling me about this stuff. I'll let them know they can fix this stuff.

[bidi]

Well, guess I was wrong on that one. I know several people who have had issues with old .docs and trying to do stuff with them in 2007. They were just telling me about this stuff. I'll let them know they can fix this stuff.

The biggest trouble that I've ran into seems to be because .docx has extensions which are not available in .doc (this also happens with Excel and Powerpoint) and Office 2007 will, under no circumstance, let you save a file with 2007 features as a .doc and loose those features... you pretty much have to find what the problem is and remove it.

I also agree with Agent-X on the other stuff. Seems like everything in 2007 takes twice as long to do because you have to go from tab to tab in order to do something that was available under toolbars (I always had the most used stuff on toolbars, and barely ever went through the menu).

[RobinVossen]

I saw a bunch of eyecandy that was unproductive and unorganized.

welcome to the Wonderfull world of Microsoft.
They make everything sparkle and start yelling that stuff is more secure and then they earn lots of money.
But in the mean while you just see they are Copying OpenSource software.
The new IE7 looks a bit to much like Firefox doesnt it?
And doesnt all the Sparkel Sparkel from Vista exist first in beryl... (if I recall correctly Beryl was abit earlyer.. if not *sorry*)
Microsoft is losing the war and they know it..

[Vergil83]

I got a docx file and I thought I would be clever. It is just an xml file, I will just read the text (that is all I really care about). It was quite unreadable (compared with an rss feed for example). However, I do like the fact that images are seperated from the text. Inside the .docx the images are stored as you would store them in a folder.

However, I think I will stick my my LaTeX thank you very much.

[ingis]

Well, no offence, but danbuter is way off base. All you have to do is tell it to save as a .doc. The default format is .docx, yes, but that doesn't mean it isn't compatible with older version. Heck, I have to use this function at work all the time since I can't open .docx at home.

Not to mention, MS now offers .docx capability to Office 2003. If there's one thing that I'll give to MS is that they were really on top of this issue. Granted they completely butchered Office 2007 with that stupid menu structure, at least they are not only backward compatible, but they made their old format forward compatible too.

Simple do not use that .docx format. There is already a standard ISO26300 named Open Document Format (ODF)
.docx is even incompatible with MS proposed OOXML "standard". So DO NOT EXPECT any interoperability between such formats.
There is converter for MS Office with enables MS Office to save documents in MS Office in ODF