Five reasons not to upgrade to Office 2007

Angus Kidman
Monday, 04 December 2006 05:14

Your IT - Home IT

There's been coverage galore of the benefits of the new interface sported by Office 2007, but there are plenty of good reasons not to make the switch to the latest version of Microsoft's best-selling product suite. Here's five of the most compelling.

If you fit any of these scenarios, then there's precious little point in making an immediate switch to what the company refers to as the "2007 Office System", either now (when it's available for corporate licence holders) or in January, when it goes on sale at retailers.

Reason 1: You already know how to use your favourite Office applications. The centrepiece of the latest release of Office is the new ribbon interface, which Microsoft has endlessly touted as making it easier to discover many of the features which are already included in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but which users have somehow failed to discover buried under a wealth of menus and toolbars.

This is a perfectly valid argument as far as new users are concerned, but Office itself is hardly a new product, with some elements of it now dating back more than 20 years. That means that there's several million people who actually know what they're doing with the product -- or rather, who did until Microsoft decided that menus were entirely unnecessary.

The sole concession to these users is a series of interactive guides on the Microsoft Web site which map . I've asked Microsoft several times why there couldn't be an option to overlay the old menu interface for existing users -- switched off by default, but available if you want it -- and never received a satisfactory reply. The bottom line remains: if you know what you're doing, why would you want to waste time having to learn a whole new product just because Microsoft thinks it's a good idea?

Reason 2: You like a consistent interface in all of your apps. Despite the endless pro-ribbon propaganda, it's not actually found in every element of Office. In particular, it hasn't been introduced to Outlook. Microsoft officials say this is simply a question of resources, and that the ribbon will probably appear there eventually. A cynic might argue that Outlook has fewer buried features, and thus demonstrates that the ribbon isn't needed anyway.