I just can't see it. I am interested in other's opinions on this.
Don't be shy please.
Before using Office 2004, I might not have found a compelling reason to
upgrade either, but having used it for months, I couldn't go back.
Here's a few things:
1) The biggest thing for me is Project Center. I have completely changed
the way I keep track of my projects. I normally have at least 3
work-related projects in active development, and several in some stage
of preparation or completion. The ability to keep all my files, emails,
notes, tasks, schedule, and contacts in one place within Office makes my
life much easier. Even more important, being able to switch projects in
a heartbeat from within any application makes me *much* more responsive
when one of my clients calls me up for something that will "just take a
minute". Being able to find the file or note within a project makes it
much closer to really being a minute away from what I was working on.
There are significant improvements to be made for the next version, but
it's a great start.
2) Unicode. The increased compatibility with WinWord, and the ability to
exchange files with my foreign clients using Word removes a real, nearly
show-stopping PITA.
3) Word's notebook view. When I first saw this, I was sure that I would
never in a million years find myself using it. Now I use it every day.
While it's billed as kind of a student tool (especially with the blue
rules), I find it incredibly useful while taking notes at a client
meeting or on a phone call. I use audio notes when I'm responsible for
the meeting minutes, and have even had one occasion when the note saved
me the price of the full Office 2004 suite when I was able to play back
a note for my client's boss showing that the client had in fact asked
for a design change. The biggest drawback to this feature is that it's
not integrated with Project notes - it would be nice to have a single
repository, but I'm finding it's still workable.
4) Track Changes - I've found that Word 2004's Track Changes feature is
much more stable than previous versions. I don't care about seeing the
changes in balloons, but I do care that I don't lose changes in a crash.
5) Long file names. While I personally think that 31 characters should
be enough for anyone, my clients use dozens to hundreds of characters in
their filenames. A minor annoyance removed.
6) While I know XL very well, I find the tooltips that show the syntax
for functions, and provide a link to their Help topic, are rapidly
becoming indispensible. Where I *really* need them is in the Visual
Basic Editor, though <sigh>.
7) Smart buttons - I paste a lot of data into Word and XL. The ability
to reformat/undo the default format makes it much easier to produce a
document.
8) Formatting palette. The ability to add "objects" (a poor choice of
words - some of the items are in fact Office objects, many are not)
significantly reduces the number of times I have to go to the menus, or
to use dialogs to format/customize the objects, particularly Charts. The
palette's fading is a nice feature, too.
