Office 2007

Is it worth getting? I've seen some pretty awful reviews; but I need to buy a copy of Office (whether it 2007 or an earlier version) and I don't want to waste my money on an old version if it is going to be outdated, but then again I don;t want to pay over the odds for the new one.

We've got Office 2003 at work... although this is for home use. I was going to get that gaming PC but change of circumstances ("!") mean getting this laptop instead:

http://www.rockdirect.com/viewNotebook.php?pName=XTREME 770

But I'd like to keep a toe in at work while I'm off, which means I need to be able to use email, have a diary, spreadsheets and do some typing. The lappy doesn't come with anything, so I'm having to buy it.

Only I dunno what I should get -- and it's a lot of money to blow if I get it wrong (I want something that'll last me a while)

Office 2003 is good enough. From what little I've seen of 2007, it doesn't look that great, and has a different set up from other versions that may take some getting used to. Don't fix what isn't broke.

Hell, I've been using Office 2000 for quite some time now (nearly 7 years obviously), and it works perfectly.

I have it and I like it. But as Dan said, it is quite different. I got it through an educator's discount (about 40% off the regular price).

I like it as well. I upgraded all our office computers, and the computers at home, to Office 2007 because I liked it so much.

I've spotted Office 2007 Home & Student + Outlook on Amazon for £164.96 ... so that should cover me with Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote (what is that?) for all I need (I'm pretty sure it's the full thing and not an upgrade ).

Office Standard Edition 2003 (Excel, Outlook, Word, Powerpoint) is new on Amazon for £335. I don't use Powerpont though.

So on balance, I reckon I should get Home & Student + Outlook and add to it if I need to at a later stage.

For that price I would hope it's the full thing.

My teacher discount allowed me to get the professional for $189.95 (about £92).

Is that the same price they give to students at universities? That's how I get mine, I still know people in college and have them buy me copies of deep discounted items.

nice laptop, harddrive on it a bit small for the money thro.

Could get a nice Gaming PC with the same sort of spec for £300-400

Probably. The site that I use gives the discount to students, teachers, and schools.

And even homeschools.....

http://www.educational-software.com/home.html

I had a copy, installed it, didn't like it, sold it to someone else.

I beta tested Office 2007 and I can't say that I cared for it all that much. Even after finishing the beta I have chosen to stick with Office 2003.

I like it.

It's better.

It sucks to adjust to change but Office 2007 is a fantastic example of a good UI.

Hardcore office users will probably dislike having to relearn where to find things. Casual users and new users will love the new interface. Things are easier to find and settings / menus are more clear.

The issue is that while people who have used Office have to relearn how to do things, newcomers to Office can pick it up much, much faster than with the previous versions.

I've been using it for about a year now and I'm still getting used to it. Just re-familiarized myself w/ powerpoint over the last few weeks. The features are amazing once you get used to them though.

Quite possibly ( although you forgot that some things can't be relearned because they CAN'T BE DONE ANYMORE ), but can 2k7 actually do anything that 2k3 and earlier can't?

What are the added functions in Office 2007? I'll admit, I can't remember the added functions after testing the product for almost a year. I used it in the same fashion that I use my 2003 version of Office.

MS Office Home & Student: £92.94

Switch to Thunderbird.

OpenOffice has decent cross-functionality. Given the price (free) it's worth trying.

It does a decent job of opening Office formats, but once you start getting into anything more complicated than text formatting (this includes something as basic as a table), it can get pretty crazy pretty quickly.

I still recommend 2007, even if you're familiar with 2003 and below - it's always a great selling point to be literate in two different sorts of workflow.

It is a better version of Office than 2003, but one of the things I dislike about it is that the default file type is incompatible with previous versions of Office. You have to select the compatibility file type if you intend to share documents you create with people who haveprevious versions of Office.... RE: everybody else.

I still like it, however.

My only problem with that is it takes about a minute to start up on our machine, even with the "Quickstarter" enabled.

I'm not seeing anyone mentioning a single feature that's new in MS Office 2k7, btw. I suppose I could go to a website, but based on the misdesign in the last several versions, I figure I'll probably get a headache from salespeak sooner than pick out any actual features. And if it's worth having a feature, the feature ought to be reasonably memorable anyway . . .

/\ The wikipedia article has a lot of detail on the new features. None of it seemed terribly compelling, though.

I wonder if they've fixed the Excel "scroll at speed of light or speed of snail" issue?

Markedly better UI.

I like it. Even though I was used to Office 2003, I found 2007 easy to figure out.

I did find the "ribbon" to be a bit gaudy with icons too big and looking sort of messy, but it's easy enough to hide it and bring it back when you need it.

The worst part is saving it in compatibility mode for sure if you need to send a file to a friend. I don't know how many years it will take to sort that out.

The issue with compatibility mode (and really, the compatible files produced work really quite well, and preserve a hell of a lot of the formatting) is that it's only going to get better as more people adopt the software (or install the fucking free compatibility pack, you lazy bums).

It is, in a way, a lot like Vista adoption. It seems quite slow and clunky at the beginning because you're installing a lot of programs and some drivers, tweaking features, and, most importantly, establishing a drive index. But once you're settled, it works pretty damn well, and is a marked improvement over XP.

In terms of features, while you might not like the Ribbon UI, they've built up a very nice API around it that allows you to extend Office in a much more powerful, graceful manner than before. Live Preview is also really nice, especially in (as much as I hate it) PowerPoint.

The big, descriptive tooltips also help with discoverability. Spell checking that takes context into account is also huge. In Excel, they also have kind of a neat feature where you can use gradients to determine "how much" of something there is at a glance.

In short, the UI was the biggest improvement, but there are a lot of little tweaks here and there that help contribute. The new UI also has a feature that nobody can really see yet - it allows for the graceful addition of new features in future versions of the program, rather than just slamming stuff into menus, an ever-increasing number of toolbars, side-panel stuff, etc., etc.