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.