bit-tech Shopping: Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate

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

• Microsoft Windows XP
• Windows 2003 Server

Rating: 10

Time with product:

Strengths: Excellent New Interface & Navigation

Weaknesses: Expensive

Summary: I decided to take the plunge and install Windows Vista which required that I also upgrade Office. The installation was easy with one DVD. The new interface is great and does away with myriad menu bars. Both Vista and Office have been very stable. There's a learning curve to figure out where all the menu items are hidden and the software is a bit expensive, but I highly recommend the upgrade, even if you're sticking with XP for now.

Rating: 10

Time with product: 7 Days

Strengths: Great new interface. Great new look. Same best-of-breed office software. Lots of add-ins and software included. License allows for three installations.

Weaknesses: A bit expensive. The menu layout takes getting used to. Some menu items are buried pretty deep which makes them difficult to find.

Summary: Our upgrade to Windows Vista required us to also upgrade Office. We couldn't be happier. The software was very easy to install from a single DVD and has been very stable. The menu bars and drop-down menus have been merged into new navigation interface and productivity is really enhanced once you learn where all the menu items are located. However, our favorite upgrade is the very fast email indexing and searching in Outlook. Painfully slow email searches are a thing of the past. Office is still the best office suite available.

Rating: 8

Time with product: 1 Month

Strengths: Nice User Interface. Excel is more stable with macros

Weaknesses: Saves everything in a new format, expensive, better to get the student teacher edition if you qualify.

Summary: I overall think this is a good product, although quite expensive, it saves everything in a new format, although backward compatible with the older format. It was a lot more stable and fixed issues I had with macros in Excel 2003 however.

Rating: 10

Time with product: 3 Weeks

Strengths: Super Productive, Much More intuitive interface, many useful add-ins.

Weaknesses: None, Semi Large installation space needed (Greater then 1.5 GB)

Summary: Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate is an excellent product for work and home it has many helpful mini templates to get the job done. I love its new "Fluent User" Interface that only puts out the tools that you use on specific tasks. Its overall design is excellent, I am glad upgraded would recommend it to SMB users or power users like me. Very Stable.

Rating: 10

Time with product: 4 Weeks

Strengths: New looks

Weaknesses: None so far

Summary: This is the most full package, including all of the applications from other packages. New looks are very nice, love new menus instead of toolbars. Works fine on Vista Ultimate, but needs time to used to it, or find some settings. Even, usually you find them at the place you think it should be.