bit-tech Shopping: Microsoft Office 2007 Small Business

• E-mail/Contact Manager
• Presentation
• Publishing/Marketing
• Spreadsheet
• Word Processor

• Microsoft Windows XP
• Windows 2003 Server

Rating: 8

Time with product: 4 Months

Strengths: Search Engine with Outlook, reduced memory usage for apps

Weaknesses: Hard to transition from previous versions

Summary: Since I had to migrate to Office2007 on my work computer, I decided to move my home PC over to avoid confusion between the two versions.I agree that the migration process is somewhat difficult since the menu locations of features have been drastically reformatted.Fortunately Microsoft provides some nice migration tools (look at their office web site), especially the demo which allows you to pick a command from Office 2003, and see exactly where it is located in 2007.Being a keyboard user, I decided to minimize the ribbon and use the keyboard shortcuts to access the various menus.The various apps have been re-architected from previous years. Microsoft noticed they kept heaping on new features with every version, and this caused the apps to become cumbersome and memory hogs. The 2007 apps use significantly less memory.One of the best features is the automatic search function in Outlook (which uses Microsoft Search 4 in XP, and is native in Vista). I love being able to use the same formatting for search results (such as view by conversation).You can download a trial version for thirty days. My suggestion is take a day out to work through the new apps to find your normal features in 2007.

Rating: 6

Time with product:

Strengths: Outlook 2007

Weaknesses: Everyhing else

Summary: I hate the new Office "ribbons" technology - replacing the menus and shortcuts with an oversized toolbar that you can switch between "Home", "Page Layout", "View", and other settings. The trouble is finding the settings that you want to apply - font settings are in Home, comments are in Reviewing, I still have no idea where picture/object formatting is. I spend more time trying to figure out where common functions are located: captions, cross references, table of contents, etc., then I used to in 2003. Ribbons = Bad.The only redeeming quality is Outlook 2007 - I have 4 POP accounts, Gmail, Exchange, and IMAP. In 2003, all POP mail would be delivered into the Exchange inbox, and I would have to create a rule to move it to another folder. Now, you can have multiple PST files and have POP accounts delivered directly into the right inbox. Still can't have multiple Exchange accounts, which is disappointing, as I have two Exchange servers and 3-4 mail accounts that I access, but that's annoying but easy enough to fix with multiple Outlook profiles.Docx and Xlsx formats are the new Microsoft formats for Word documents and Excel spreadsheets - other then being slightly smaller in size then 2003 formats the only reason for these stupid things is to force people to upgrade to 2007 or download a '2007 patch' for Office 2003.I don't see any real compelling reason to upgrade to 2007 from 2003. I still like it better than Open Office 2.0, though.

Rating: 6

Time with product: 1 Days

Strengths: Pretty. Some interesting UI changes.

Weaknesses: Bloated and crashy.

Summary: MS has made some interesting user interface face changes, but they are not, in my opinion, well thought out. Same strange allocations of features among differing 'ribbons' (no more menus) - and there's little provision for customizing. Speaking of customizing, Styles and style management have gone through some interesting UI changes, but still not well structured - and predicting actual effects is, as always, an eccentric experience; ditto for template management. I upgraded to keep up with a client. I wouldn't advise upgrading unless you need to do so to get everyone on to the same version. Points for trying though, MS. And, it's very pretty, which is nice.