Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007
Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007
Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 Reviews
While Office 2003 offered a refreshed look and some improvements in functionality, the basic structure remained the same. While veteran users were able to easily navigate the familiar menus, it had become increasingly difficult to locate some features (for instance, in Word, would you find “insert new rows” to a table in the “insert” or “table” menu?).
With Office 2007, Microsoft offers the “ribbon”, a new and more intuitive way to access features that we used to find in the menus. While the features are basically the same, they are now grouped together according to when and how you would normally use them. These groupings are accessed by clicking on tabs, which are organized in the order you’d use them. The best way to get a better understanding of this change is to check out the screenshots, or download a free trial version of Office from Microsoft. While Office 2007 was released at the same time as Vista, you do not need Vista in order to run it. The program ran fine on my Windows XP laptop, which only had 512 MB of RAM, and it runs even better on my Vista laptop with 2 GB of RAM.
As for which version of Office to buy, this is the third time I’ve opted for the Home and Student version (which has had other names in previous releases, but is still being sold for $149). I need Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and this is the most cost-effective way to get those programs. I was disappointed that Microsoft dropped Outlook from the Home and Student version. In order to continue to use Outlook, I installed Outlook 2003 and haven’t had any problems.
Instead of Outlook, you get OneNote, a program that uses notebooks and tabs to save and organize all sorts of files and documents. I haven’t had much time to play with OneNote yet, but the more I use it, the more impressed I am with it. It looks like one of those programs that you can personalize to meet your own needs and not have to fight with it to get it to do what you want.
I will make this as short as I can. I am a long time user (~10yrs) of MS Office, many versions of both Word and Excel. When I started having some compatibility issues with my old version, I decided to upgrade. My advice to you is, at all costs, avoid upgrading if you can. If you can choose a different product (non-Office), do it.
In Word especially, all the old interfaces have been completely redone, from the menus available right to the way help is (dis)organized. Many of the old usability features, such as templates (for letters), how you interact with colors/fonts/etc., and how you print, preview, and perform simple functions, are gone or changed.
Microsoft apparently believes that manuals are a thing of the past, so finding out where my old options are, if they still exist, has been a chore of figuring out which of the dozens of help topics are actually relevant, and if they will help me (which they typically haven’t).
Even in Excel there have been interface and usability changes that have made it difficult for me to work with it, given my long history with previous versions.
My only caveat is that brand new users may find it easier to work with than old ones, but again, the poor help system would hinder even that, I would think.
Best of luck.
Sure, this release has lots of “improvements”. I’ll focus on Excel. The biggest potential improvement is that the row and column maximums have been opened up.
Beyond that, I’ve encountered nothing but problems.
* Once a document is saved in the new .xlsx format, Excel would not save back to the older .xls format. Instead, it just hung.
* The software refused to change the limits on a date x-axis of my charts. Instead it blithly reset the values back to the original values.
* It is SLOW. Clicking on a curve in a chart could take 10-20 seconds to respond.
* Occasionally, Excel would just crash for no obvious reason. The up side is that it would restart with opening the same workbooks.
Also, as usual, I have been unable to find a place on the Microsoft web site to report such troubles. All I’ve been able to find are FAQs that answer queries unrelated to the problems I’ve had.
Maybe you can work with that. I gave up and am just hoping that my new laptop is still functioning by the time that Microsoft gets around to noticing such glitches and releasing a service pack. Maybe next year?
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