Software

RE: Office 2007: Are you planning to upgrade?

PsyberDave — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:27:00 GMT

I'll echo the last two comments. If I can impart one piece of information about Office 2007 it is this: Office 2007 has a new interface that requires previous users to spend considerable time learning to use the new product. This translates to decreased productivity, increased frustration, and the costs associated with such. The frustration and lost productivity may be temporary, but they are costs, nevertheless.

Also, since the new formats of Word and Excel documents can create problems when sharing those files with others who have not also upgraded (i.e. most others), frustration and lost productivity occur there too if the documents are not saved in the old format or if recipients have not installed the conversion software.

Even if you get this product at a low cost from TechSoup, training and reduced productivity may be costs to consider.

RE: Office 2007: Are you planning to upgrade?

lano — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:36:00 GMT

I'm just throwing a "me too" in the mix, and to suggest a voluntary transition.

I personally like 2007. The ribbon took a while to learn, and things still aren't as intuitive as they used to be for me. But overall, the improvements in the right-click menus are enough to sell me.

But I'm not my users. I'm the IT guy. And the thought of throwing my not-so-savvy users in the Office 2007 Ribbon deep-end gives me chills. The productivity and morale hit we'd take while they fumbled around and re-learned how to do all the tasks they already know to do in 2003... it's prohibitive. We could train them for a week and they'd still have to fumble around for months. It's just not worth it.

Default installation is still 2003, and it will be for a few more years. But, when I have a user who's used 2007 before, I'm more than glad to install 2007 for them. Everyone at the office has the compatibility pack installed, and I set 2007 installations to save in 2003 format besides. Everyone wins.

RE: Office 2007: Are you planning to upgrade?

Yann — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:41:00 GMT

Quite a few companies have decided to put off upgrading to Office 2007. I know of one major Canadian bank that, for the time being, has decided to keep all of its employees on the current Office 2003 setup.

This makes sense: imagine the logistical mess and impact to business productivity and internal workflow associated with having to retrain thousands of employees on Office 2007.

I guess such a large-scale move can be handled in a series of phases to ease the transition process. But even still, things are bound to get messy when internally you've got various departments using different versions of the suite.

Myself, I've played around a bit with the new Office 2007 and decided to stick with 2003 for as long as possible. The only upgrade I've made to the suite is my use of OneNote 2007. I just started using OneNote recently and thought it made sense to jump to the latest version, which is a nice step up features-wise from OneNote 2003 (very few changes have been made to the program's UI). But the other Office apps I use -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Visio -- are all 2003.

Unless you're the type to avoid using Office altogether, for the rest of us I think it's just a matter of time before we make the jump to 2007. As much as many of us would like stay on 2003 for as long as we can, how long can this really last?

Yann

RE: Office 2007: Are you planning to upgrade?

shipley.c — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:34:00 GMT

Hi Donna,

As I was considering how best to reply and construct a bunch of screen shots with instructions on how to do each one, I decided instead to create a short (very short) training video on the topic. You can simply change the default save type of documents in Word 2007 (and Excel and PowerPoint) to be the older format, and your colleagues won't have difficulties in opening them. Here's a link to my video listing. Just click on the Change default save type in Word 2007 video. Hope that helps. Once you've changed teh default save type and clicked OK, you should be all set.

For documents you've already created, you'll have open them first, click the Office Button, then click "Save As..." You'll see an option for Word 97-2003 there. The icons are slightly different in display between the new and old versions.

(note: The video loops, so once I clicked OK, the screen will show you a blank Word Document, then loop back to the start of the video again. These are not additional instructions.)

RE: Office 2007: Are you planning to upgrade?

DonnaHoffmann@worldnet.att.net — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:21:00 GMT

I have upgraded and when I email a word doc to anyone they cannot open it and read it. What good is it to have 2007 when this is the case. How do I get my Word doc to stop doing this?

RE: Office 2007: Are you planning to upgrade?

kjstrat — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:01:00 GMT

I don't get it sometimes. I know Office 2007 is said to comply (with caveats) to a more open standard for document formats, but everything I read is they're still going their own way in MS fashion regarding the OpenDocument format (ODF). It seems every post here regarding the reasons to upgrade is for compatibility, which is still going to require ass't plug-ins for other vendors' office apps.

I won't upgrade to Office 2007 unless or until I have to support it more extensively than I do at this point. I'd certainly run it in a compatibility mode to handle the older Office formats. In my job, I see a lot more older apps than newer ones out there, and in that world, the Office 2000/2003 formats still rule the day. As for ODF, it's success depends to a large degree on MS's participation, which is minimal at this point. Sorry if the ODF diatribe is out of scope here, but I don't see Office 2007 as all that compatible with anything but itself.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. :(

RE: Office 2007: Are you planning to upgrade?

ApneaCentral — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:44:00 GMT

I was involved in the private beta test of Vista and Office2k7, and when Office2k7, and Vista, were released, I upgraded my personal machines to the latest.

Awake In America moved to the new platforms, well, we do have one computer running Win2k, one with WinXP, and a couple with Linux, and one, for a good chuckle, running Win3.11WFW (Windows 3.11 Windows For Workgroups), but that machine is for secure transactions, locking down files, and is not networked. We have one box that's running as a hardware firewall, which is running (xxxxx - not listed for security reasons). ;)

The reasons to upgrade: compatibility with others in the corporate world that you will/may collaborate with on a regular basis; the ability to use the latest storage methods (XML, etc.), and many other features that are in Office2k7. In fact, we considered migrating to OpenOffice.org, but for a variety of reasons, after a great deal of testing -- holding both MS Office and OpenOffice.org to the same standards -- OOo failed to meet the standards we had. Was there a bias in favor of MS Office? Not really. We developed, over a four month period, a rigid plan for testing and evaluating both products, based on our use, activities, and needs.

During the planning, if it is "the basic" stuff you need, OOo did fairly well. When it came to compliance with standards, OOo didn't do so well, especially in saving to MS Word format so others who do use MS Office could open and read the files. When printing, the files did not print as expected. Issues with the spreadsheet also arose.

In the end, migrating to OOo would have been a great downgrade for us.

Cheers,
Dave Jackson
National Coordinator
Awake In America, Inc.
http://www.AwakeInAmerica.org/
AIM/AOL: AwakeInAmerica05
V: 215-764-6568

RE: Oh Please....Just Do It

shipley.c — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:23:00 GMT

In my opinion, there is impending reason to upgrade to Office 2007. There is a freely-downloadable compatibility pack for Office XP and Office 2003 on Microsoft's website. This does more than let you view a docx file, it lets you edit, save in the format, etc.

Anyway, if you are using a current, supported version of a product, feel free to skip the next release (i.e. if you're using 2003, skip 2007). Plenty of companies do it and they aren't hurting. It all depends on your preference - but Office 2007 isn't A) going away or B) causing the end of life of Office 2003.

The interface is very different, as previously mentioned in this post. Maybe your users don't handle change well. The "productivity gains" in Office 2007 are pretty shallow when your primary use of Office products is to write a mail merge or answer an email.

RE: Oh Please....Just Do It

jared@bogus — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:10:00 GMT

i rank office 07 up there with vista ..

not gonna happen

ever..
its just not intuitive i have been using word since the 2.0 mac version ~1988 or so and this version is aweful

ill move the company to open office first

RE: Oh Please....Just Do It

donc — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:55:00 GMT

LOL - Being named 'Office 2003' doesn't mean it went EOL in the year 2003 - O2K3 is still a current and supported product, as is O2K7. When we do roll-out O2K7 organization-wide we intend to properly plan and manage the deployment.

Cheers - Don

Oh Please....Just Do It

hayesb — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 20:01:00 GMT

Just upgrade already. It's 2008. 2003 was FIVE years ago. That's forever in tech time. It's not a big deal. We had NO problems. Get one or two users on board and then roll from there. You will hate 2003 once you use 2007. I tell users to try the new interface for a week. If they don't like it, I'll switch them to classic more. Everyone likes it once they get over the hump. Don't worry about the compatibility mode. If you are in 2003 and you try to open 2007, you get prompted for a download. Just do it.

RE: Office 2007: Are you planning to upgrade?

donc — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:51:00 GMT

Hi Tracee,

Looks like your org managed this transition particularly well - well done! - did you implement a transitionary period? (a tiered roll-out or utilize O2K3 with the O2K7 compatiability kit etc.), or just do the roll-out and provide training to everyone at the same time?

Because it went so well for you I'm interested in how you managed the process.

Don

RE: Office 2007: Are you planning to upgrade?

tracee — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:28:00 GMT

They love Office 2007 in our office. We have about 100 employees scattered throughout several offices and cities. We made 2 hours of training mandatory and scheduled them in groups of 5 or less. I think, perhaps because of the training, and the positive fun attitude of the trainer, this was the easiest change for our employees. What's the point of having current technology and software if the users can't use it efficiently. Easiest rollout to date.

RE: Office 2007: Are you planning to upgrade?

tracee — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 20:34:00 GMT

We are a non profit with around 50 PCs. We're grateful that we can purchase software through TechSoup and that so many different companies donate. That said....I was only going to upgrade some of the PCs to Office 2007. It's always difficult for people to get through a change in software. Was I surprised. They LOVED it. Everybody wanted it. Purchased more licenses. Primarily, what they were happiest about was the ribbon. Things that were hidden before are now easy to use because they are easily seen. We did provide classes for all employees. Software isn't much good if the people with the software can't use it. They are also aware that they should never send any document out to other agencies as a .doc. That's assuming that all other agencies are using Office....they save the documents as .doc or .docx but if they want to send it out they change it to .rtf or with one click in Office 2007 they can change it to .pdf and send it out.

RE: Office 2007: Are you planning to upgrade?

Holdstrong — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 15:33:00 GMT

We upgraded right away and it has been fine.

We started to get docx sent our way from various sources outside the organization and instead of going around and installing the viewers on every machine we figured why not just go around and install the new version. That way we'd be able to view both formats and we'd be able to produce both formats - and of course we can also take advantage of some of the new features.

The only minor concern I had was the new interface, so I created a quick info section on our Intranet about it just to give employees a heads up in advance. Most of them have reported that it took them a day to get used to the major changes, and they are still slowly working through and getting used to the minor changes. (like, for example, why on earth does the new outlook calendar not include a word wrap in its monthly view? :confused; Hahah)