And were are not alone. There are about ten other cities in out region that has done the same. In fact, they are collaborating to be able to support each other in this mayor change of software.

Just thought you would like to know…

Also there is NO conversion for Access 2003 to read the new Access 2007 files YET they force access users to save in a format that is less compatible.

Why has office gone away from standards. I find software easier to use when they follow standards.

The only issue so far has been that if I put 3-D borders on my inserted images in 2007 Word, a user of 2003 Word cannot open the file without 2003 Word trying to covert the encoding, which it cannot do. The 2003 Word user gets a document full of junk characters.

Once we identified the 3-D borders as the culprit and changed them to plain vanilla borders, there was no issue.

Time will tell, but at this point I think the migration is pain-free. Are the changes between 2003 and 2007 worth the expense of changing? If you are just a guy and the change is for your PC alone, then probably not. But if you are a company and can afford the migration cost, go for it.

I don’t run a company neither I’m in charge of any part of one, I a simple student, but it became obvious that this 007 thing is just a waste of money, time, and everything.

Lets say u run a company, mmm, asume that you are in charge of … 500 machines, better, 100, or just 50, and that suddenly, as part of a corporate upgrade plan you upgrade to the latest version of office.

What happens? Well… there is the inherent cost of the licenses, lets assume that your company can afford it, its expensive but you can.

But… what about real usage, what happens when your workforce is confronted to a “complete new software”? I mean, they already know how to use office 2003, but now they have to deal with a complete UI redesign and that takes time a frustration to get used to.

Lets assume that you dont care about the the initial shock your workforce will face, but, whats next? the IT th
eam will star receiving calls, ehhh, sir, “where is the button to print”, or “sir, I cant find this menu”, or “where is this button”, or “I mailed the document but they tell me that it cant be opened”

Now your IT deparment is flooding with request of help, help that is necessary to do the everyday work, help that cant be denied because its crucial.

Ok, now you have wasted a considerable amount of time, you decide that this cant continue and you start a capacitation program, it takes time and money, but it worth it, right? RIGHT?

NO! it takes just too much effort, time, money and frustration to archive NOTHING. Office 2007 just adds another layer of incompatibility, and unnecessary complexity, givin almost no new features.

Since office 97 we have been used to a interface that proved to be reliable, heck!! since word perfect!!! (thats as far as my memory goes), now we are faced to something completely new, no other program made use of the how is it called lace? ribbon?

Change is not good by nature, it is good when it represents a step forward.

Sadly we have no other choice but to adapt, right, RIGHT?

well, NO!

Doesn’t anyone like the right-click ability in Office 2007 to change a font color, select font attributes, etc? I think this is real helpful. Or how about being able to see and right click to fix spelling errors in Outlook? Or the To-do bar that hides on the side in Outlook? Pretty neat, I say. A lot of formatting tasks are easier in Office 2007. Even that old dog Powerpoint has some new functionality.

Really miss the old tech TV. Anyway another little thing bout Office 2007, if you send e-mail directly from 2007 users of 2003 can’t open it unless you download the patch! Had a customer who does a newsletter who found out about this the hard way!

Ozmont

Unfortunately, the biggest change is under the hood: The use of the MS Word rendering engine for HTML instead of Internet Explorer, as was the case in all prior versions of Outlook.

The huge downside is that MS Word’s support for HTML is weak at best. You’ll find that many HTML-formatted emails and newsletters look very different in Outlook 2007, and almost always worse. Some things are obvious, like no more support for animated GIFs (you just get a static image of the last frame). But there’s lots of others, including no support for the gradient background graphics used in many emails, support for a more limited subset of CSS features, etc. Basically, MS Word has always sucked for viewing or editing HTML — but now it’s what you’ll be using to view every email.

In effect, Microsoft has taken formatting support in Outlook 2007 back at least five years at a time when we were finally getting close to consistent and full support for HTML and CSS in most email clients. Last week, I wasted a full extra day creating a simple HTML-formatted newsletter just to ensure that it rendered similarly in MS Word (aka Outlook 2007) as it did in IE (aka Outlook 2000, XP, and 2003) and just about every other major email client. It took some pretty horrible HTML to achieve, including messy in-line HMTL that I’d never had to use in the past. But Outlook has such a commanding share of the market that we now have the dubious honor of a new “lowest common denominator” to contend with. I suspect many emailers will simply ignore the problems until Outlook 2007’s market share climbs to the point that they are forced to code to its low standards rather than hand-craft workarounds for the limitations as I did.

Finally, while I find Outlook 2007 a bit faster than 2003 for many things, I’m seeing noticeable slowdowns in viewing some emails either by opening or using the preview pane. In general, Word seems to be slower than IE when confronted with complex HTML. And unsupported HTML within an incoming email sometimes causes my system to hang while Word apparently tries (unsuccessfully) to figure out how to handle it. A great example is the daily CareerBuilder job alert that used to open instantly, but now completely locks my system for almost 30 seconds before appearing (their use of now-unsupported background gradient graphics seems to be the cause).

IMHO, Outlook 2007 offers a few steps forward, but a BIG one backward!

– Rob