As I noted previously, my hard drive crash has been quite the learning experience. It has, however, opened the doors for cleaning my system and upgrading some software.
Since I am an adjunct faculty at Indiana University, I can get some software through special license agreements. As I was rebuilding my system last week, I noticed that IU had both Office 2003 and 2007 available. There was a warning in bold red letters letting everyone know that default 2007 documents are not backward compatible with Office 2003 and anyone needing such compatibility should use the “save as” function and save as a 2003 document. While this seems like it is a nefarious plot to force/encourage everyone to upgrade, I decided to play the role of lemming and take a leap off the cliff. I still have access to 2003 on my laptop and figured that students would soon be turning in papers using 2007 and I did not want to ask them to resend papers to me (the plot is working).
I have not worked extensively with the suite yet because it is only on my home PC (corporations will probably be much slower to make the change) but a few quick thoughts:
Most of my experience so far has been with Outlook and Word.
The good:
Much has been made of the new interface and how it differs from the typical Windows menu experience. While it is difficult to break habits, I found that the new interface had some things in much more logical places (finally I can insert a table from the “insert” tab rather than having a separate “table” tab). It will take more real work and a few projects to determine whether the overall design is a win, lose, or draw.
Outlook was much easier to set up. I maintain a bunch of different email addresses for various projects and had a sophisticated rules structure in place to speed sorting. I dreaded having to set all of these addresses up again after the crash but 2007 did it quite easily (with one exception, all I had to enter was the email address and the password and Outlook found the server and configured the account properly – my university account has much higher security and still had to be hand-configured). The rules wizard still functioned about the same way as earlier Outlook but seemed to notice when things were not quite right (restoration of a previous rules file pointed to some missing folders, etc.).
Finally perhaps it is some illusion or the fact that my computer was already faltering but Outlook 2007 seems to open much faster than Outlook 2003.
The bad:
The compatibility issue is going to create no small level of headaches for a long time into the future. I remember the days when there had to be third-party filters to convert between software and later versions of the same software. Perhaps a small update to 2003 is in order to smooth this out (of course, that would foil the plot)?
Even though programs seem to launch faster, the suite does consume more system resources and, when paired with Vista, I’m sure will require more memory and processing than my 11-month old computer can handle.
One big unanswered question: Does Endnote work with the new Word? According to the Endnote website, only up to Office 2003 is currently supported. Whether this is an omission on the Endnote site or a complete lack of compatibility is not yet certain. This issue could have a big impact on a few small papers I am currently writing (e.g. dissertation…).
[Edit]: It does appear Word 2007 is supported in Endnote X according to this updated page.
My overall impression of Office 2007 is that the software interface is improved but the jury is still out on functionality until I get under the hood a bit more.
