Review: MS Office 2007

I was recently fortunate enough to obtain a copy of CodeWeavers' Crossover Office Professional, which I've been using to play some two-year old Windows games on my Kubuntu laptop. I never really planned to buy a copy of MS Office, but an unacceptably slow response by the university's IT department to fix my network connection at the new building forced the issue.

I bought a copy of MS Office 2007, as Office XP wasn't available in stores. The software installed with no issues, and I was able to register and activate the product.

Admittedly, I was completely unprepared for the interface. Gone are the traditional Windows menu styles, where regularly accessed utilities are available as toolbar buttons, and everything else can be found in the main sub-menus or by appropriate right-clicking. Instead, the sub-menus are shown as tabs, similar to the Firefox browser. The user is stuck with the classification of the utilities under each tab, and there is no other way to access them. There is no way to revert back to the old interface.

This is one of the things that has always irritated me about Microsoft software. They always try to force the customer to use the software a certain way, and it's either impossible or a real pain in the ass to circumvent that. What if the customer doesn't think about the process of putting together a document the same way a developer does? Why should the customer always have to change the way he/she does things every time Microsoft comes out with a new release?

Here is an example. When I create an xy-plot in Excel, and I want to adjust the settings on the line (the default settings for the points on the line are too big, and the line too fat, so I need to reduce them) -- I can't just select the line and right-click. I have to select the line, then go to the Format Tab...then hidden among the clutter of in-your-face buttons, at the far left is an option for "Format Selection." Clicking that gets me the menu to adjust the settings on the line. I then have to repeat that for each line.

One really major annoyance is the fact that Excel 2007 won't let the user save a graph as a picture (jpeg, gif, etc.). Previous versions of Excel allowed this, but for some reason the MS Office developers felt users didn't need this anymore. What user won't want to place an image of a graph into a presentation, an email, or a pdf document? What retarded logic was used to decide this feature needed to be dropped? I searched Google and found a VB macro someone wrote to enable this, but it didn't work. Excel complained it was out of memory, then the same error message continued from there on in Chinese and symbols. I deleted the junk macro. The lack of the ability to save graphs as images was a really stupid oversight on behalf of Microsoft.

Another nasty surprise for future users of MS Office 2007 is that the document windows force themselves to consume your entire screen. Look at me! Look at me! Don't bother with any other programs you might have open. Doesn't matter if I have email open or something else live that I might be wanting to see notifications on. There is nothing in the configurations of Word 2007 or Excel 2007 that allow freedom from this compulsory full-screen window. There is no option to remedy this even in the "Windows" tab within the applications. Users are simply stuck, as always.

Finally, it won't come as a surprise to anyone that MS Office 2007 is a memory pig. The applications are constantly trying to keep the document you are working on up-to-date. Every single change invokes a full document refresh. It's no surprise this is heavy on resources. Word 2007 actually froze up and crashed on me at one point when I was just trying to scroll down to the next page. Thankfully, the document recovery tools have been improved somewhat, and I didn't lose anything. However, I've learned from using previous versions of MS Office to save often. I save after every significant change I make.

Thankfully, I don't have to actually have the Windows operating system installed to compound my problems. Killing the applications when they freeze up is trivial. I can either kill the task using Crossover, or do it the old-fashioned Unix way with the command line.

And open source software lets me work around some of the retarded limitations imposed by MS Office 2007. I can use Gnumeric to save my Excel graphs as images in a variety of formats. Open Office works well with Word documents if I get too frustrated on the Microsoft side. I had a report with images I wanted to save aside as jpegs. I couldn't do that in Word, but with Open Office, I select the image, right-click->Copy, then in GIMP I select Paste As -> New Image. Done. No nonsense. No crashing or locking up. And all the windows are resizable.

I will be using MS Office 2007 as little as possible, and am extremely grateful to the Linux community for providing such great flexible, robust, and stable applications. Once I am done with my PhD and settled in my new career, I intend to donate heavily to keep good Linux applications available.

Wrapping Up The Trip

The research trip to North America is coming to a close. We are currently in Canada and fly back to Australia in a few more days. Towards the end of my stay in North Dartmouth, I took the bus to Boston with Okan Ala, one of the students I was working with. Boston was an interesting city, obviously full of history. We arrived at about 8 a.m. and walked all over town all day. The walk along the harbor was pleasant, and we made our way to where the USS Constitution ("Old Ironsides") was docked. The guided tour of the ship was free of charge, and genuinely interesting.



After lunch at a family Italian restaurant on the north side, we wandered back to a large shopping area, browsed the shops, watched some street performers (one from Sydney, even), and enjoyed some good coffee. As evening approached, we began walking across the city to the REI store. We finally reached our destination after about an hour and a half of walking, and I found a couple more small items I wanted at the store. Afterwards, we went to a Turkish restaurant with one of the other researchers who has done inkjet printing of cells to discuss his work over dinner. The last bus back departed at about 9 p.m., and I was back at my motel around 10:30.

It's been nice to see Canada again, and to get a brief tour of the University of Waterloo from Michelle's uncle. When we first arrived, it was unseasonably warm, and one day I was wearing just shorts and a t-shirt. However, winter has begun, and we are seeing snow flurries. Most of the area here is farm country, which can be nice in some ways -- but the downside is all the towns are quite small. The land is mostly rolling hills -- no real mountains. Probably the worst aspect is this entire area is downwind from Detroit, so all the pollution there blows through here. Toronto has become so expensive that these small farm towns are becomming outer suburbs. Cookie-cutter houses are going up everywhere, and the construction quality appears marginal. For now, we don't really see ourselves coming to this area -- primarily, because the university doesn't really have any research groups that fit in with my work so far. If we come to Canada at all, it will likely be around Ottawa or out west.



We got lucky while the weather was still pleasant and went to Niagara Falls. The site is impressive, and it's plain to see that the energy of all the water is massive. The Canadian side definitely has the better view. The falls in total consist of Niagara Falls, which is a wide, straight waterfall, and Horseshoe Falls, which is shaped according to its name and seems more powerfull. We paid for the tunnel tour, which begins with an elevator descent of 100 or so feet. The tunnels themselves are painted white and large enough that most people should not feel any claustrophobia. The tunnels are dug so that there are two branches that lead to observation doorways behind the falls. The noise is fantastic, and indicative of the amount of energy dispersed. A third branch of the tunnel leads to an observation deck near the base of the falls. The entire site is worth a trip.



We are now looking forward to getting back to Australia and returning to a normal routine again, not to mention enjoying warmer temperatures.