Hi Scott:
Oh we¹ve been using Office 2007 since early beta stages. But you and I are
in different businesses. My clients don¹t use a new version because its a
new version; it has to be able to get their job done better and faster.
Office 2007 has yet to prove to us decision-makers that it does something
Word 2003 can¹t do, that we would use in an everyday environment.
It's faster and it doesn't crash as often.
It doesn't corrupt documents.
The files are a quarter the size.
Compliance to corporate standards can be enforced.
Those things are worth having to my clients
While the
change may not be significant to you, in our testing it proved to be
frustrating to users (across all applications, not just Word).
I suspect you used experienced users and you didn't let the test run long
enough. As a very experienced user, it took me more than two months to get
used to the new UI. Newbies get it in about half a day
We exchange Office documents with hundreds of thousands of people on a daily
basis. I don¹t see people swarming to use Microsoft¹s XML format. And until
the OpenDoc ³standards² settle, I don¹t see it happening.
You wouldn't expect it yet, surely?? Large corporations have a software
roll-out cycle of about four years per platform. And it takes them two
years to plan and deploy. So if they went to 2003, the earliest they would
have done that is 2005. That means they won't go to 2007 until 2009.
My clients are stuck about half-in-half. Some are actively working on their
2007 roll-out. The others are waiting for Office 2009. The ones on
drip-feed volume licensing tend to go early. The ones that buy boxed copies
tend to buy every alternate version
As far as metadata goes, you are talking about a catch 22: you have to use
Word 2007 to strip metadata, but we¹re not going to deploy Office 2007.
Rubbish! You can strip metadata in any version of Word since 97
Acrobat¹s tools for stripping metadata and redaction are superior, easier to
use, and, most importantly to us, the PDF format is a fully-governmental
compliant format to use for dissemination of information to citizens.
Yeah, but in corporate service it's a PITA. If you get a PDF version, you
immediately have to email the sender and ask for a "useable" version. Then
they'll send you another PDF. Then you have to go back to them and explain
that you don't want to read it, you want to "use" it, and you will finally
get a Word version, usually appallingly-badly formatted
The fact is, having been in corporate IT for so long, 80% of users, will
never use 90% of features in Word or Excel.
Yes: But "which" 10 per cent WILL they use?
This is such an oft-quoted statistic (originally from Microsoft...) that it
has become industry lore. However, the original research was not published.
If you get hold of the original study you will see that the statement was
carelessly phrased.
What they should have said is "For 80 per cent of users, EACH user users a
subset comprising no more than 10 per cent of the application's functions.
However, for each user, the functions in use are slightly different.
I could have sworn that NOBODY in the whole world EVER uses "Blue
Background, White Text". Go on: Betcha can't find it
However, as soon
as I said they were going to take the feature out, the three users in the
entire world still using the function descended on my head like a pack of
rabid dogs
I¹ve yet hear someone
say ³Gee, I wish Word/Excel had this feature...² that is fulfilled by 2007.
Well, that's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy if you won't roll it out
But I can tell you that "Themes" have been offered in Word since 2002.
Nobody has ever bothered with them. But since Word 2008, all of a sudden
we're doing a brisk trade in theme-related questions in here. So they've
found that one!
List styles is another. They have also been around since Word 2000. All of
a sudden, we're getting questions on them, because the new user interface
stuffed them in the user's faces where they can find them.
And slowly, but inexorably, Word is being used just as the drafting part of
publishing documents. Complex documents are assembled by a team in InDesign
for distribution via PDF, for version-control and security.
No: There you are definitely dreaming of the "good old days"
That's
the way things USED to be, when I started in the industry. Documents were
hand-written by subject-matter-experts. They were typed up by the typing
pool. Then sent off to DTP for formatting and output.
Doesn't happen any longer, except in a few astonishingly rare companies.
Not even the government can afford that level of embellishment these days
I put 5,000-page books to press straight out of Word. InDesign has
been confined to the Marketing Department, where they use it to indulge in
endless arguments with hapless printers who are unable to colour-match the
result
Office 2008 for Mac seems to be a better ³jack-of-all-trades² for Mac users.
You haven't tried to use it for corporate work yet
Come back when you
have, and let's see if your opinion remains the same
I like it¹s Notebook layout (though I wish it integrated better with
Entourage, like OneNote does with Outlook). VBA just needs to make a
comeback.
Yeah, well that "was" mentioned once or twice on our wish-list when we were
in Redmond last month. Along with one or two other little items that you
may not have missed yet, but they're gone or not working right
The recent issue of Macworld had an editorial on why it is so difficult for
Microsoft to make substantial changes to its core products, and when it
does, there is a hue and cry about it. This certainly applies to Vista and
Office 2007.
MacWorld is not the first journal I would turn to if I were looking for
authoritative comment on the goings-on at Microsoft. Come to think of it, I
would not turn to ANYTHING that depends for its livelihood on sales of
software or advertising to be especially accurate on that score.
Vista was a classic stuff-up. Even Steve Ballmer agrees
I worked on
the beta, and I could tell you exactly what went wrong. But basically, the
design team considered input from a large number of stakeholders, NONE of
whom were end-users.
Word 2007 is a totally different kettle of fish. The only real mistake
there was by the Marketing Department. I suspect there was an extremely
potent batch of cocaine came in from Columbia that month... They ended up
describing it as something it isn't, tried to sell it to customers who
didn't need it, and aimed it at users who couldn't understand it!
Under the surface, it's quite a good product (better than 2003, not quite at
the level of 2000...). But it has some seriously good and important
benefits for the heavyweight users and the corporate users. This will
become increasingly apparent over time.
Perhaps one of the things they should have done was add an ODF transform to
it right out of the box. I understand there is one now, or soon will be.
As soon as there is, people will instantly discover that ODF is not powerful
enough to describe the modern corporate document, and the noise about it
will die down.
Cheers
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John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Nhulunbuy, NT, Australia. mailto:
[email protected]