Office 2007: Impressive. Ish.

I finished installing Office 2007 about 15 minutes ago, and have loaded up most of the programs and had a fiddle. Everything seems very shiny, and even the ribbon seems like a good idea, so far.

But what impressed me most was that I have already managed to crash Publisher. All I tried to do was to import an image.

True, Publisher has always been the poor relative of the Office suite, and every release merely brings it up to the level you'd have expected it to be at in the previous release. Still, it seems a shame that the three main programs (Word, Excel and Powerpoint) are the only ones to benefit from the ribbon, at least most of the time.

In fact, most of the dialog boxes don't seem to have have changed much since Office 2000. This makes the whole thing a bit ragged at the edges, and gives a lot of it the feel of a half-finished beta. For example, Outlook doesn't have the ribbon at the top, but does at the top of the e-mail composition window (because that's Word based, I guess). Everything is blue and 2007, until you get to the 'Send' and 'To...' buttons, which are W95 grey. From Outlook screenshots I've seen, I don't think it's supposed to look like that - but it does on mine:

The blue ribbon from Office 2007, next to the grey 'Send' button in Outlook

Even without that, it's all a bit too inconsistent and incompetent for a program suite that costs so much and is used by so many. The options systems in Outlook is a classic example - there are approximately one million different option menus hidden around the various screens and menus, and none of them let me tick a box that says 'Automatically expand all mail folders' or 'Read in plain text', which is a shame.

It's also a shame that Outlook notes still have the same interface that they had in Office 97. ~100px square yellow popup windows with no scroll bars? I think the fact the text is still rendered in Comic Sans sums up the dev team's attitude towards them.

Screenshot of notes in Office 2007, demonstrating lack of scroll bars

It's all a bit sluggish, but then I expected that - it takes up 2GB when installed, and I'm running it on my laptop (Office 2007 requires XP or higher), which is a feeble 1.5GHz machine with a mere 512MB RAM. I can't help thinking of Impression Style on my A3000 - it runs fine from a single 800 KB disk, on a system with 1 MB RAM - and in many ways, it's better than Word. Still, hopefully Office should be a bit more responsive on my desktop when I get round to installing Vista on it.

Here's an entertaining aside: US customers pay ~£150 less for Office Pro, and get Accounting Express bundled with it too.

Now that I've been using Office for just over an hour, what do I think? Well, at first glance it looks very shiny, and I like lots of the little things they've done. But delve a little deeper and it's riddled with bloat, bugs, inconsistencies and missed opportunities.

A typical Microsoft product then.

Do I regret buying it? No more than I did when I clicked the order button. I've struggled for the past couple of years with Open Office, but no longer - I need full document compatibility with the stuff I'm sent by clients.

And, sadly, that's exactly why Office will sell fantastically well.

Leave a comment