Word 2007: The Feature I Hate Most
The feature I hate most in Word 2007 is the new user interface - the Ribbon. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now, and I have found that all the new ribbon does is serve to frustrate me when I am working with Word documents. All the functions I used to use are hidden and not easily available. Word now insists that it knows how I want to format my document better than I do, and consistently display unwanted, un-needed and inappropriate options for formatting.
It takes more clicks to find the function I want, and often times I’m unable to find what I am looking for. Here’s a very explicit example:
When working on a document, I rely on document styles to mark up parts of the document. Document-derived styles are hidden under a very small button, and the ‘quick styles’ can not be set to the document styles, only those that Microsoft think I want to use.
The same goes for colours. There’s a colour missing from the default colour set: Blue. That’s RGB #0000FF. There are variants on the shade of blue, but not blue.
Then there’s the ‘themes’. Apparently when I select a font, what I want is a font from one of the ‘themes’, rather than a font I’ve already used. And you can’t disable themes, much as I have no use for them and never want to use them.
Lastly, I used to have all the functions I wanted on a single toolbar, and could access them all with a single click. Now it takes several (3 or more) to access common functions that used to be a single click away.
The upshot is that Word 2007, even after using for a couple of weeks and ‘getting used to it’ is having a detrimental effect on my productivity.
Oh, and don’t get me started on the 3 second pause whenever I bring the program into focus…
April 14th, 2007 at 5:45 am
We understand your frustration which is why we created a product that brings back the familiar Office 2003 interface into Office 2007 so people could still migrate to Office 2007 which is a great product.
Please check out our product ToolbarToggle which enables anyone to have a full working replica of the old menus, and commandbars with full customization features (macros, autotext, new toolbars) as well as floating and docking capabilities too!
You can download the demo at http://www.toolbartoggle.com
We hope this helps.
April 17th, 2007 at 5:22 am
couldn’t agree more with your feedback on Word 2007. Have been looking for instructions on how to disable this junk and rebuild my old toolbars. If you know how…please pass along.
At this point, I have ordered a copy of Office 2003 and plan to uninstall 2007 unless I find another option.
Overall, I thoroughly dislike Vista. 2007 Excel is fine, but everything else just slows down my work.
Cheers!
April 28th, 2007 at 2:29 am
This is my first time writing a review, so you can imagine how desperate I am. I really really dislike this office 2007 and Vista. It slows me down, isnt intuitive, has excessive features. Power point is a disaster.
Can I really just dump this 07 and go back to an earlier version? Am I fighting using things (e.g., formats) everyone else will be using eventually?
If someone has experience with this please email me.
doucem@gmail.com
Thank you
Monique
April 29th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Why?? Why would they not give the option to use the toolbars from earlier versions of Word?!? I now have to go to my laptop and use Word there. Thankfully I haven’t installed 2007 on it yet. Very poor user functionality.
May 15th, 2007 at 3:55 am
If there is one thing that drives me CRAZY about Office 2007 it is the fact that, in addition to the great points that are in this article, it is that there is no way to customize the Word 2007 ribbon and use space efficiently. That stupid ribbon takes up so much space that on a widescreen laptop you lose a huge chunk of your page view per screen. With Office 2007 you can no longer drag the entire toolbars to float anywhere you want or appear vertically on the sides of a page instead of horizontally. Even if you stack icon bars on the top of your page, the ribbon STILL takes up more space.
Next let us talk about how many clicks you must perform in Office 2007. We used to have quick and efficient dropdown menus in Office 2003. Hiding that stupid ribbon and showing it to save your lost vertical space requires even more clicks every time you want to do something as simple as bolding text as in “click on bold icon.” Instead it’s 3+ clicks such as “click on minimized ribbon and start with home menu and hope I got the right section, if not click on the other menus to ensure I am viewing the right ribbon, click on bold icon, click ribbon again to hide it.” Even if it ISN’T hidden if you’re on the wrong menu on the ribbon you must first select the right one and THEN choose your button. It completely defeats the purpose of the toolbar itself, which allowed you quick, one click access to the functions you use most!!!
Vista isn’t as bad but it too has a user interface that baffles the imagination. What happened to the quick dropdown menu that allowed you to easily navigate up and down the tree leading to the directory that you are currently in? Sorry, but you must click additional times on the side menus to navigate. It is absurd and mind boggling to understand how so many people and so much money could miss a lack of functionality this obvious.
May 16th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
Get OpenOffice - much better.
May 17th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Well, I have made the move to 100% OpenOffice, and a lot of people I know and work with (and not technical people either) are doing the same.
May 24th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
This new Word is driving me nuts! Everything seems to take longer, all my lovely tools bars are hiding and I can’t find the things I like to use. Like where the hell is the insert file path autotext for footers. I would really love to know. The Help is completely useless on this.
May 31st, 2007 at 3:52 pm
OpenOffice here I come!
Thanks everyone, I thought I was the only one pulling my hair out with the new “improved” UI in Microsoft.
June 17th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Arrgh! - I may have to try Toolbartoggle. I spent a good 5 minutes trying to find out how to add bullets to existing text with Word ‘07. I can’t fathom why MS had to change the interface so radically, without leaving in the old one as an alternative. Nothing “brave” about it - mostly just stupid. I’m going to start a campaign with our IT dept to NOT adopt Office 2007 as a standard anytime soon. That ought to PO Microsoft, since we have 300,000 employees and it’s easy to point out to IT the expense of making people learn a new interface.
June 26th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
I looked at Office 2007 on a test server at work… hate it! I tried a simple Word document where I wanted Heading2 on top of a paragraph. Couldn’t find it, after searching for ten minutes.
I searched a lot of web sites about this stupid Ribbon and I did find a number of Google hits telling us how great this new UI is, how much more productive we will be… then of course, I look at the URL of the page and it usually turns out to be either a vendor who sells the product, or more often, a Microsoft site (MSDN, microsoft.com, etc.)
If it takes me ten minutes to find, or should I say, fail to find, a simple style that Word 2000 and 2003 let me choose in about one second from the toolbar, how is this an improvement? They also claimed that the Ribbon “solves the problem” of having toolbars scattered all over the window…. I often purposefully tear off a toolbar and drag it to a spot near where I will be using it… evidently, I should be ashamed of myself for doing this, and Microsoft is now “saving” me from my own habits, helping me to have a nice pristine working window that looks like the marketing screenshots!
Nice try, Microsoft, but no thanks. The Ribbon is completely counter to the way I think and work, and serves only to confuse and frustrate me that I can’t use the software effectively any more, and unless the menus and toolbars are reinstated in a service pack or the next version, my home computers will not see Office 2007 or later… OpenOffice is free, is already on my laptop and I am happy with it. Why should I spend money to buy software that I will find useless? I shouldn’t… and I won’t.
My $0.02 worh (in Canadian funds)
Mike
July 17th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
I’ve only worked with Office 2007 for a few days…and can’t stand the ribbon either. I’m dumbfounded why Microsoft would include a “Classic View” option in Windows XP but not even consider the same for Office 2007. I totally agree that my production level has dropped since trying to use this new version of Office. I’m going to stick with 2003 until Microsoft gets their act together and cleans up the desktop. Yuck!!
July 25th, 2007 at 6:53 am
Screw this, threre’s NO WAY I would ‘upgrade’ to 2007 even if it was free. (Heck, even if they PAID me to upgrade).
Unless and until Microsoft realizes they URGENTLY need to provide a ’service pack’ that gives people the option of regular menus, it’s Office 2003 for me.
August 23rd, 2007 at 2:26 pm
I totally agree with all these criticisms. I have used Word for 15 years. Despite its many quirks, I’ve always thought it was Microsoft’s best application.
Updates to Word over the years have always added some new features. Some were very useful (eg, the redline spell check feature, which is now everywhere). Many were gimmicky, or just not all that useful to me, but at least most of the time they didn’t get in the way. (Exceptions include the infamous talking paperclip.)
But I think Word 2007 is the first time I’ve felt lost. It doesn’t feel like Word any more. I use styles all the time, but they’ve become awkward to use. The ribbon bar is ungainly and confusing. I’m pretty familiar with where the menus used to be. Now I’m lost. It’s like I’m learning a completely different word processor - one requiring more clicks than Word. I’ve been using it a couple of months now, and getting anything done seems to take longer. Downgrading to Word 2007 has been a ba-a-a-ad move.
For some time, I’ve been debating whether to switch to OpenOffice Write. It’s free, feels like Word, and isn’t overloaded with bells and whistles. I’ve given it a couple of test spins. It does a great job with styles (they work much more logically laid out than Word), but there are annoying incompatibilities with Word (eg, highlighted text gets changed to text with background colour). But now, with the new docx format, it seems that even MS Word isn’t that compatible with MS Word, so I have a feeling I’ll be making the switch soon.
September 9th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
Word 2007 is nothing more than bloatware released to make a perfectly good product obsolete.
On a computer that was just fine before, it now takes several (upwards of 7) seconds just to open a simple text document. This is after upgrading to a gig of RAM. Switching between documents has me muttering to myself.
Hey! Maybe if I spend $7000 on a ‘dream machine’, it will be powerful enough to type with.
September 18th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
I couldn’t agree more with these reviews. I have the trial version of Office 2007 and it is truly terrible. I have used Word since Windows 95. Why do I need to keep searching for features that previously I knew how to find? I gave up with trying to find the “Print” button and resort to all the short cut keys, or even the “New” and “Open” buttons. Can you imagine the pain that every company will go through trying to retrain their staff to use it?
Also, when uploading my cv on job sites, none of them accept the new file ending so I had to go back and re-save all my documents as .docs.
Definitely one to avoid.
November 8th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
I listed everything I hate about office 2007 on my site too. It’s horrible - However, I’m not going back. It sucks, but I’m trapped in a 4 gig .pst and need to get out from underneath it. Maybe Googleapps…!
w ww. pdxtc. com/ wpblog/ archives/ 462
November 23rd, 2007 at 11:21 pm
The other thing that occurs to me is that you are going to have to relearn everything in each new version.
Why?
Because new features will be added. That means they’ll want you to see those features prominently on the Ribbon.
But, wait! The ribbon is full. What do Microsoft do? Take some of the things that are already visible and banish them to the hidden recesses where the other more useful things were hidden for 2007, so that there is a space for the shiny new, but likely non-critical, features.
We users won’t mind having to rediscover once again where our favourite features have been hidden, will we?
Mike
December 2nd, 2007 at 11:56 am
I think microsoft have tried to hard. I am just an ordinary bloke, not a software engineer. If it gets any worse I am going back to a mechanical typewriter and good old blackboard and chalk.
December 3rd, 2007 at 1:18 am
Wait.. The idea behind the ribbon is changing the way you think about creating documents. You ‘choose’ what you want to type, you type, and that’s it. Consistent layouts were almost impossible to create for average writers (I’m talking about the Styling features). This changes everything.
What features are you missing? Please, all of the above comments, give some examples. Say what you actually miss as opposed to guessing that you would miss something.
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:17 pm
I started a new job recently and all of the sudden I’m forced to use this bloated crap called Office 2007. I’m a programmer and have used office since Office 2.0 came out and I always liked the well organized menus from before. This is complete rubbish.
In response to John’s question “What features are you missing”? I am missing an intuitive interface OK? This interface is not designed for intelligent human beings who are accustomed to having menus organized by their type of functionality… this interface is designed for computer illiterate people who have to learn everything from scratch and who can’t think logically. They already have Macintoshes for those types of people
You know, come to think of it this might be a blessing in disguise. Why should Microsoft be telling me how I should be using software? OpenOffice here I come.
Screw you Bill!
December 10th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Yes,I am now using OpenOffice.org too and it does what I need, and lets me work the way I work best, not the way Microsoft thinks I should be working (which apparently involves trying to figure out where things are rather than getting actual work done).
And best of all, OOo costs nothing but a few minutes to download and install. Actually, even that is less time than Office takes, and you can get working in it right away, not several days/weeks/months later when you finally find that basic command you needed.
Mike
December 11th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
One of the worst things they have done is to remove the Auto Complete feature for text. Legal types - paralegals, legal secretaries, etc. are going to revolt on that change with all of the repetitive typing they have to do. The new “Building Blocks” simply doesn’t meet the need in this profession. It’s going to drive the legal workforce back to 2003 or to WordPerfect or some other solution that will continue to meet their needs.
December 18th, 2007 at 11:04 pm
I couldn’t agree more with the majority. This new version is a travesty. The biggest complaint I have is the lack of customizable toolbars. I have plenty of macros that I’ve created and now all of them that I want to use I have I have to stick on the Quick Access Toolbar. And then I can’t change the button image!!!! Total crap!
December 19th, 2007 at 12:06 am
I, too, just started a new job, assuring my new boss during the interview that I was a-near Microsoft Office expert. I mean, I’ve been with Microsoft products since they were first released to the public. I can do things in a split second and move on to complete my jobs. Productivity increased each year, even while “learning” new versions of previous releases.
Imagine my HORROR when I opened up the Microsoft Office 2007 on my first day and saw a completely new interface with all the programs appearing as alien software.
WTF? I have lost hours in productivity. What used to take me a split second, takes a hell of a long time to figure out before Word even begins to cooperate with me.
This is a new job! I feel as if I am in danger of being fired. The IT people in the office will not allow us to uninstall this Microsoft travesty, so I am stuck with it - and as a result, I am losing confidence in my ability to do a good day’s work.
My computer also will not allow me to install OpenOffice, which I thought would save my life. We are truly hamstrung with what we can install/uninstall on our computers.
I have finally found something called “amiword” to use as my word processing program and hope that it suffices.
Does anyone know if OpenOffice can be installed in pieces and not have it impact the operating system?
This is the first time since the early 90s that I have actively hated Microsoft software. I have been a Microsoft champion in years past. NO MORE.
What a piece of crap Office 2007 is. A travesty.
I will NEVER install it on my home computer. NEVER.
December 19th, 2007 at 12:22 am
oops, my erro - not “amiword” - it’s “abiword” - a word processing program that resembles Word.
January 4th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
“word 2007″ hate in google yields 50200 entries today 4th January 2008, and tomorrow…
January 14th, 2008 at 5:46 am
I HATE the new office and word 2007. I HATE IT. Seriously I cant find how to do the simplest things.
Why replace the file menu with that dam logo thing, took me 10 min to figure out how to save a file! the project manager in charge of development of this product should be sent packing.
January 14th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Hate it. I wrote a Word97 manual for my teachers learning computer use back in the 90’s. I wouldn’t begin to do that again with this piece of rubbish.
It drove my Father up the wall because he couldn’t click on his envelope addresses and print them as he’d done for 8 years using ‘97. It took me a day of fiddling and swearing to manually setup his Lexmark so it understood the “new and improved” way of Word 2007. I don’t want “Styles” taking up half my toolbar. I want my classic menus back!
January 27th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I’m an engineer with a degree in computer simulation. I’ve been using Word since 1996 and really dislike the new interface. I’ve wasted what must be hours trying to find the functions that I had at the press of a couple of keyboard keys before. I’m really not impressed that Word decides either not to accept or else not to use my new keyboard shortcuts because it knows better.
The contextual ribbons are contrary to the way I think and work. They fundamentally don’t do what I want them to. I’m particularly hacked off with the Word 2007 implementation of tables - something I use in almost every report I write. Who wants 57 varieties of pretty coloured tables? All I want is a plain table with a defined top row in another colour - usually pale yellow or pale grey. I don’t want every other row in a colour! Phne call from my wife “I’m in Word on your computer - where’s the ****** file menu - I can’t find out how to open my documents”. Clever Microsoft - not, make it harder for users.
The ribbon takes up far too much space on my widescreen laptop and leaves me with much less useable screen space. If I minimise the ribbon then it’s a click to bring it back, then another to find the one I want and then a third to try and use it.
Excel isn’t too bad - except for the b****y ribbon again, at least, it not as bad as Word. PowerPoint - again, not as bad as Word but still pretty grim. All take 3-4 clicks where one or two keypad presses used to work.
Don’t get me started on the stupid “themes”. I want colours that I pick, not themes.
We had also invested much time and effort in customising Word to meet our company specific report writing requirements, headers, footers, headings, table styles, all with macros and shortcuts and customised macro buttons. Yet another non-customisable feature in Office 2007 - the macro button image.
One last criticism, the low contrast colour schemes that mean all Office Apps look exactly the same mean that users with poor eyesight really can’t use office easily.
I have now loaded Open Office onto the PC and am customising it to look like Word!
February 7th, 2008 at 8:39 am
I just hate Office 2007 totally, it takes me twice as long to do anything, if someone is watching me I look a complete idiot whilst I trawl along trying to find out how to do something, then if I use help I just want to throw the whole thing out of the building. Why are Microsoft intent on making life difficult. Just do not get me onto the Vista topic, there is not enough room in this box!
March 7th, 2008 at 3:14 am
My workplace just forced an upgrade to Office 2007 and I’ve been raging all day.
The general attitude seems to be “yeah, new stuff is hard, right?”. It’s not that. It’s that the new interface just plain wastes more space and takes more mouse movement and clicks to use!
I can’t stand it.
March 12th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
I agree with all of you about ribbons. I thought I might get used to that but right now I’m struggling with what happened to the barcodes that I used to be able to add to addresses in envelopes and labels so so so easily in Word 2003 and can’t seem to do at all now. I’ve searched and googled and downloaded special fonts. The option to add that barcode is just gone. I don’t even know how to get back to 2003 but this 2007 is horrible!!
April 6th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
A week ago I walked into a temp assignment and they had Word 2007. At first I panicked because I couldn’t find any of my shortcuts. Two that I use frequently are autocorrect options and autotext. I soon discovered that I could customise the ribbon with all the familiar icons. When you right click on the ribbon it gives you the option to customise your own ribbon. Then I went to ‘all commands’ and I found everything I needed. So I was okay.
Otherwise I would have been a goner, I would have left the assignment and crawled back into bed by noon.
But what do I think of Word 2007? I think it is completely unnecessary. I think it was cruel and sadistic of Microsoft to do this. They had a winning formula that everyone could understand and then they screwed it up with this. While it’s true there are a few nice features, Word 2003 was just fine.
I can adapt to Word 2007, but I’m not comfortable with it.
April 6th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
One thing I wanted to add regarding Word 2007. I think a lot of us seasoned Word users have had our confidence shaken up. But it’s not us. We’re competent. This is Microsoft’s fault.
I myself am a legal secretary. What I don’t understand is before they decided to launch 2007, why didn’t Microsoft distribute a survey to people to ask them what they liked and didn’t like about Word 2000 or 2003? But no, without consulting anyone, the inflicted this piece of crap on us.
April 16th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
It’s just been announced by our IT directors that we have to move to 2007. I hate it. I HATE IT!
If you go on Microsoft’s support pages it tells you they have made a film of where to find everything from 2003 in 2007 so you can learn it easily. WHY? Why should I have to relearn something I already know? Where the f*** is the switch to make the toolbars and menus look and feel like I am used to?
I cannot switch to open office, and neither can I work with Word 2007.
God, I’m so depressed.
April 17th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
I have been a power user of Word for years. Didn’t always like certain features, but once I learned to turn off some of the automatic stuff (”No, I DON’T want bullets there!”) I was pretty happy with the program as a whole.
Until now.
Hate it. Hate is a strong word, but I mean it. Hate.
I am going to start keeping a list of my actual issues, for reference. The current one? I am trying to add a simple meta tag in the footer that automatically fills in the document file name. In 2003: View> Header/Footer> Insert Auto Text> File Name. Do that and it dropped it right where you left your cursor. Four easy steps, well identified and intuitive.
In 2007? Lord. Design tab>Header footer tools>Insert Group> Quick parts> Field >Field names>FileName. And it throws off the formating of anything else in the footer.
Walk through it. 7 clumsy moves. Note that NONE of it is intuitive or relates to anyway it was ever done before. Quick Parts? What the H*LL is that supposed to mean?
I am a contract tech writer with a decent amount of knowledge on what is usable for most end users.
And guess who loves Word 2007? People who had very little knowledge of it before. “Look what the new Word can do!” It could do that before, they just didn’t know it. Meanwhile, the stuff I need to do my job is buried under obscure titles.
All I want is my damn tool bars back. Seriously.
And yes, it took me to figure out how much of the basic stuff was hidden under the Word Icon at the top left of the document. Not so intuitive, folks.
Praying for a Service Pack Update to save me! that or the Togglebars utility. Ticked that it has to come to that.
June 10th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Add me to the list of people who *hate* Word 2007. I’ve been using Word for over 15 years and thought of myself as a power user. I was the one people called over when they needed to make Word “behave” or use a feature they’d never used before.
Not anymore. Every task I want to do seems to take multiple clicks. I had customized task bars to do all of my most common tasks, including assigning common styles. I haven’t even figured out how styles work in Word 2007–everything seems to be theme based–and none of those themes match my corporate formats.
I spend a lot of time in help and a lot of time clicking back and forth across the ribbon. Between it being a pain to use and everyone here complaining about the upgrade, my productivity has decreased.
I also really dislike the new color scheme. I like having the top bar a contrasting color to help me move back and forth through the windows. With the colors being so close, and half the top bar being part of the ribbon, it’s much more difficult to switch back and forth between windows. If you’re trying to go back and forth between a Word document and a related spreadhseet, it’s really hard to “find” the top bar.
About the only thing I like about the new Word is the hover formatting feature and even that is taking a while to get used to.
We’re still using 2003 at home–and we’ll stick with it. For what it’s worth, my 13 year old daughter hates Office 2007 as well–both Word and PowerPoint.
Microsoft wants people to spend money on software–after all, it’s been years since we had to purchase Word upgrades (XP to 2003). They’ve got to get our money out of us somehow.
I actually can get a *free* copy of Office 2007 from work as part of our employee home use program–and I’m not taking advantage of that. I’ll stick with 2003.
July 3rd, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Just FYI: I hate Office 2007, BUT, it does have some features that make it more useful, IF you can get past the ribbon, which sucks. What I’ve done to make it somewhat palatable is 1) minimze the ribbon (right click on the quick access toolbar-QATto make that choice) 2) place the QAT below the ribbon so it looks like a toolbar, and 3) right click on the QAT and choose customize, from which you choose all sorts of commands to place on the QAT. It’s a poor substitute, to be sure–I used to use highly customized office toolbars–and no excuse for the piss-poor design done by MS, but it does help make it less painful. Oh yeah, I too have access to the Home Use Program, and I DID get a copy. Like I said, 2007 does have some features that are way better than 2003, especially in Excel and Access, which is now a lot easier for people to use. I hope this helped…
July 26th, 2008 at 9:08 am
Unbelievable. I went from extremely productive and competent to completely lost and irate..and paid Microsoft a considerable sum to do it! I couldn’t agree more with all of the posts here (except for John, post no. 20). The loss of productivity is astounding. I work in a technology firm, and spent years training government employees how to use their new computers, after upgrades. Thank God that’s not my job anymore, because my former colleagues are pulling their hair out trying to get personnel up to speed. It doesn’t make sense to anyone (tech support or users). I know many IT guys are very hardcore about new upgrades, but there’s a point where you have to weigh the costs/benefits. My office is completely uninstalling Word 2007, and it will not be supported by our IT guys. We simply can’t afford to waste any more time trying do simple tasks, and there is nothing we need to do that can’t be done in a fraction of the time with other software apps (such as openoffice). If time is money, Word 2007 isn’t an option.
BTW, I’m not anti-Microsoft. I actually really like Vista, and I’ve been using Word 2007 since it was released, so I did give it ample time to grow on me. It just never did, because it doesn’t make any sense.
July 30th, 2008 at 5:07 am
Word 2007 ribbon is without a doubt the most counter productive piece of shit product that MS has ever pushed out. I have just two questions - are they smoking crack and do they work in the real world? Other then the tech loving folks that treat a computer as a toy and not an office tool actually have time to cuddle up with this Bull Shit software to “get to know it” -nobody wants to spend their valuable time hunting for buttons and features that they have used for years. It’s about the WATER and not the freaking pipes Microsoft -I don’t care how damn pretty it is because that won’t make any of us more money but spitting out a proposal or banging out a business agreement when your client request it ASAP will and they don’t give damn that your IT folks wanted the most over marketing BS software ever made and to top it off - THEY MAY NOT EVEN BE ABLE TO OPEN THE FKG DOCUMENT WHEN THEY FINALLY GET IT. Thanks for the upgrade Microsoft, I can’t wait to see what brilliant moves you make to polish this turd - by the way has anyone tried to get their money back, WON’T HAPPEN once opened - forget the lost productivity. And please no one needs to tell me to spend more time with it
August 16th, 2008 at 10:34 am
I have worked in IT for many years and stupidly put office 2007 on my pc at home while my wife stayed with office 2003. My problems have been listed by others before, simple things like line spacing, having to do two button clicks instead of one etc, it is a pig of a program to use and takes an age to load a new document on a 2.8ghz pc with 3gb of ram!
I used to support imacs and emacs up until last year and on opening this product this was my first thought apple software. terrible terrible product
August 23rd, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Hey John NL (No. 20), Word 2007 no longer lets you “choose” text animation. There is a solution, but it is as baroque as the rest of the interface. Word 2007 does support animation in documents created in older versions of Word. If you just happen to have a document with the animation you want, you have to copy the animated text and then paste it into a Word 2007 document. Then you write your new text around the old text. I would bet most people will choose to not use text animation anymore. I have only been using Word 2007 for a short time so I do not know if there are many other missing features. I wish I could choose the old interface, but Word 2007 does not include that toggle. Apparently the toggle exists. ToolbarToggle (No.1) seems to be the only other contributor to this discussion that does not wish Microsoft had included this choice.
September 19th, 2008 at 9:34 am
I am absolutely dismayed by Word 2007. I have to know what the ribbon is all about to find anything and the ribbon is not inclusive of my formatting desires. This program frustrates me and inhibits timely work. Help is no help. Microsoft blew it with this program. Seems like big brother to me. They know more about what I want and need than do I. Well, this is not true.
I have used Word for over 20 years and this is the most frustrating and least hospitable version yet.
YUCK, YUCK, YUCK. They should have asked users for input before they made these radical changes. It is a bad program. I long for Windows 2003.
September 23rd, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Like all the rest, I loathe Word 2007. Same story. Stupid ribbons. I hope this software will sink Microsoft a wee bit quicker. Seriously. What were they thinking?
September 23rd, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Wow I thought it was just me!
I HATE 2007 office with a passion - uninstalling right now and wouldn’t use it again if it was free or they paid me.
Actually Vista is rubbish too.
September 26th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
The ribbon interface is so illogical that it is impossible to remember where many commands are located. I find myself tabbing through the entire ribbon over and over again. Two months of consistent use have brought me only slightly closer to the productivity I was used to in Word 2003. The latest frustrating example is trying to delete a row in a table. I’m sure some special table menu is supposed to be popping up somewhere on the ribbon but it’s not and I’ve waisted several minutes trying to figure it out. It is amazing to me that Microsoft could have missed so badly when prior versions were adequately functional.
October 3rd, 2008 at 1:56 pm
I hate Office 2007! This is such bull. As a novelist, I only need simple things (I’m still using Word 1.1a, ha!) and at work, I’ve learned to roll with the software upgrades (which I found useless, why do you need something so fancy [Word 2003] to print an envelope?). I completely freaked when my job upgraded the computers to Office 2007. WHY? All I do is type reports and quarterlies. I don’t think a bloated word processor with ribbons and menus 10 sections deep (which is messy, junky, and stupid on the programmers who wrote this crap).
As a mouse hater, I’ve memorized most of the keyboard shortcuts (it’s faster to keep your hands on the keyboard and not use the mouse). I even created macros for some of the goofy things I had to use at work, but now I can’t even do that. But Office 2007 does have ‘Office 2003 access keys’. I mean, most of you might not have to press Alt+O+E (change case), but I use it enough that I have that particular key memorized (I rather have a shortcut key, but I can’t remember that, haha).
I never did understand this whole thing of software upgrades. A simple word processor is all we need. We should go back to using Windows Write again and use a dictionary. Ok, upgrade Write with a spell check. Then we’re in business! (Don’t get me started on Word Pad, that was just nasty! No page numbers?! No headers/footers?! Be for real!!)