Shameless... I know (Office 2007 review)

Well, to my loyal readership, which seems to have dropped considerably as of late.

(In tune:) Where oh where have the bloggers gone, oh where oh where could they be? I wish they would come back and write!!! hint hint ... mom, and the list at right!So, what I am about to do is a kind of shameless plug, for Microsoft no less, particularly Office 2007. The reason I am doing this is two-fold, mainly because it may not be as shameless as you are thinking. .. While I was trialing the beta version (pre-release) which was given out free mid-last year, I actually blogged about it (here), and said that I liked it and that I may consider buying it when it came out. Well, it came out, and was a bit expensive. at over $200 bucks for the student version.

The second reason that I am going to plug it, is because for students at Universities in Australia, you could buy the most expensive version of Office 2007 for $75. I couldn't resist this purchase partially on the ground that the retail cost is $679 US for this package!!! Yup, $679!!!! Or $989.00 Australian! I paid $75, Australian dollars. I did this because while trialing the program, I really liked the ribbon menu system at the top. When I was using Excel (2007) to sort, filter and do a few other things, I learned how to do it easily on the 2007 trial, after which I went and looked for it Excel 2000 and learned how to do it there too, but the buttons were buried in sub-menus etc. I uninstalled the beta because I found that the error bars on graphs would not work correctly. Since I am a hard-core scientist, I need correct error bars. So I sent in a complaint to Microsoft, and in the released version, they work fine.

In all honesty, I do like Office 2007. I can publish to PDF, save files to be compatible with earlier Office versions, and to me at least, the ribbon bit with organized functions etc is intuitive. I was previously using Office 2000, tried later versions, but didn't like them for one reason or another. I think Office 2003 was a tragedy. Does it make me that much of a geek to be able to honestly believe that a program could be a tragedy? Don't answer that! Office 2000 was gold for me. A price of anything over $100 would not have been able to entice me to upgrade from Office 2000. But by offering Office 2007 Ultimate (with all the bells and whistles attached) at 75 bucks, I could not resist.

This is a smart move by microsoft as it stops pirating, and strengthens Microsoft's monopoly on Office suites. But the problem is, is that I think they deserve this monopoly. They make a good Office suite. It's simple to use, does what I want it to do, and doesn't crash. What more do you need or want? Even in an article that appears anti-Microsofy, Office 2007 is called "slick". You can read the article here. It does take some getting used to, but worth it.

For your info, Office Ultimate comes with these programs:
Access, Excel, Groove, InfoPath, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Word. That's 9 programs. Several of which I may never use, but I will likely at least learn what they can do. I do like the idea behind OneNote and Groove though. OneNote is kind of a digital post-it note book where you can write little notes to yourself, jot down ideas etc and keep them in some kind of order. I will be using this alot as I frequently have ideas for experiments to do in the future and it'll be nice to not loose my scraps of paper anymore. Groove, because it keeps documents updated on several different computers... so during collaborations with other departments, when person "x" modifies it on their computer, it will get modified on my computer so that I am not stuck trying to figure out which draft I am looking at. Believe me, this is a major pain in the ass. The only problem at the moment, is that my supervisor (or Boss) uses a Mac and 1: I don't know if Groove works on a Mac, 2: He doesn't have this program, amd 3: He modifies both paper copies AND digital copies to the point where he gets lost himself and I am left trying to deal with it... But the idea behind Groove should work well for people with even rudimentary organizational skills!

I also thought that I would drop in some pictures of the ribbon menu bar, just if you're interested. The first one is of Excel 2007, and the one below it is of Word 2007. See, they look different than earlier versions of Office. And I like them. (note: click on them to enlarge them further)



Final thoughts on it: Well, I probably wouldn't rush out and buy it immediately, but I would rush out and at least trial it immediately (as I did last year). At least then you can see what it offers you and if you think it's worth upgrading. For me though, I liked it and thought it worthwhile.

Remember though, this post is not a total sell out, because in one of the opening paragraphs, I said that I would probably try to get it when it came out, and I friggen reported on the beta version. It should have been expected that I would post on the final version. So there, take that.

Anyway though, enjoy your weekend.

This post is brought to you by: Too Much Free Time This Afternoon.