Had it with Office 2007
7/5/09 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wobblerlorriIf anyone asks you to "upgrade" to MS Office 2007, tell them politely yet firmly "No Fuckin' Way". You'll thank me.
As you may or may not remember (I know everyone on my FL follows my life with bated breath), I had to reload Windows XP a month or so ago, and as a result had to reinstall a lot of programs that won't work unless they're installed under the current installation of XP (what is called "registering"). One of those programs was Office.
Now, we have 2003, but I couldn't find the CD, so I installed 2007, which we happened to have (cough cough -- the Blue version). It went fine, but seemed to take forever. Finally it finished, and *nothing* was the same. Instead of the menu bar at the top, it uses something called a "ribbon", which takes up like a third of your screen. Luckily you can hide it, so you don't lose so much of your work area.
Then the menu items you use all the time are hidden in the "ribbon", under different headings than you're used to. Want to select all so you can copy? Forget just going to Edit. Now you have to open the ribbon, then open either Layout or Tools (I forget), then Select, then Select All. Printing is the same sort of agonizing exercise in Where The Hell Is It?
Yesterday though was it. I had a document I needed to save as a text file. Not a doc file. Not an RTF file. I load the file, and go to Save As... and all you can save it as is a Word file. Oh, it gives you the option of saving as a Word 2007 file, or a Word 97/2003 "compatible" file. But .txt? Forget it.
Luckily we found the 2003 CD, so right now I'm uninstalling that witches' brew (which also includes some mysterious programs I know nothing about, but which seem to have something to do with making 2007 even more cryptic and incompatible with anything that's gone before), and then I'm going to install 2003.
So remember, Just Say No to Office 2007.
ETA: uninstalling 2007 is as horrific as trying to use it. The uninstall hung after 20 min, and didn't fully uninstall. However, it did remove the Remove button from the Add/Remove Programs entry! So I had to manually remove it, which involved much manipulation of the registry. But it's gone, and now Office XP dwelleth happily on my machine (Mike brought me the wrong CD, but I could give a shit. 2007 is gone.)
As you may or may not remember (I know everyone on my FL follows my life with bated breath), I had to reload Windows XP a month or so ago, and as a result had to reinstall a lot of programs that won't work unless they're installed under the current installation of XP (what is called "registering"). One of those programs was Office.
Now, we have 2003, but I couldn't find the CD, so I installed 2007, which we happened to have (cough cough -- the Blue version). It went fine, but seemed to take forever. Finally it finished, and *nothing* was the same. Instead of the menu bar at the top, it uses something called a "ribbon", which takes up like a third of your screen. Luckily you can hide it, so you don't lose so much of your work area.
Then the menu items you use all the time are hidden in the "ribbon", under different headings than you're used to. Want to select all so you can copy? Forget just going to Edit. Now you have to open the ribbon, then open either Layout or Tools (I forget), then Select, then Select All. Printing is the same sort of agonizing exercise in Where The Hell Is It?
Yesterday though was it. I had a document I needed to save as a text file. Not a doc file. Not an RTF file. I load the file, and go to Save As... and all you can save it as is a Word file. Oh, it gives you the option of saving as a Word 2007 file, or a Word 97/2003 "compatible" file. But .txt? Forget it.
Luckily we found the 2003 CD, so right now I'm uninstalling that witches' brew (which also includes some mysterious programs I know nothing about, but which seem to have something to do with making 2007 even more cryptic and incompatible with anything that's gone before), and then I'm going to install 2003.
So remember, Just Say No to Office 2007.
ETA: uninstalling 2007 is as horrific as trying to use it. The uninstall hung after 20 min, and didn't fully uninstall. However, it did remove the Remove button from the Add/Remove Programs entry! So I had to manually remove it, which involved much manipulation of the registry. But it's gone, and now Office XP dwelleth happily on my machine (Mike brought me the wrong CD, but I could give a shit. 2007 is gone.)
