borged...

[julesjones]

Installed the Spawn of Redmond on my home machine earlier this week. I loathe Word with a fiery passion, and have no intention of using it at home other than for dealing with files from people who believe that Word Is The One True Way, but as both the day job and the writing now involve ever more frequent encounters with people who are not even aware that there exist other word processors, I don't much have choice about having it available for use, even if it's not what I use day to day. (I have nothing against Excel, but also no reason to change over from 1-2-3.)

Of course, what I've installed is 2007, since that's what there was a spare licence for lying around in this household -- and I use 2003 at work. So that's yet another set of menus to learn, then...

ETA: Please do not suggest that I download Open Office. Open Office is not reliably compatible with the group working functions in Word which are the reason for me installing the damn thing in the first place, and is all too compatible with Word in the areas which are the reason I hate having to use Word.

Comments

[doire]

Your 2007 licence might have "Downgrade Rights" which allow you to install and use earlier versions of the software.

I bought an old copy of office 2003 because I loathed the user interface in 2007. I had to teach using it and I never found how to stop the ribbon moving items about depending on how often you used them. I hear 2010 is better though.

If you install 2003 on a windows 7 machine you have to futz about a bit with administration rights to get it to realise this isn't the first time you've used it. It's well documented on MS support and a one time process.

Open office was a good idea that turned to wanna-catch-up and not-invented-here bloatware. Oh, I seem to have feelings.

[julesjones]

Thanks for suggestion about downgrade rights -- I'll check that if it seems necessary.

The detailed rant on OO is at http://julesjones.livejournal.com/132390.html - that was five years ago and the specific problem has been fixed, or so I'm told, but I've never seen any sign of the underlying developer attitude changing.

[sueo2.livejournal.com]

Download Open Office. It's free. It's MS compatible and menu-wise not any sort of learning curve at all. (Save documents as .doc and not .whatever if you want to open it in Office.)

Open office has everything: database, spreadsheet, word processor, stuff I don't remember.

[julesjones]

I understand that you're trying to be helpful. However...

My past experience has been that it is *not* compatible in areas that are the ones I actually need it for, and in fact is far less compatible with those Word features than is Lotus Word Pro, to the point of having caused me serious problems with one book shortly before it was due to go to release.

My understanding is that the particular problem I had (displaying the existence of sticky notes from editors) has been fixed, but the attitude displayed at the time to people reporting it as a bug makes it clear to me that Open Office is utterly unsuitable as a means of dealing with Word files using the group working features. This is because I cannot trust the OpenOffice developers to even bother noting that they're simply not going to display important parts of a document.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I stick with Word 2000 (Mac) becauseI actually like it (I know... I still feel unclean); I hunted down 2011 because of the 'everybody else uses Word' problem. Like you, I've tried free alternatives and found the track changes exchange to be dodgy - Pages is ok, (but I don't like that particular part of the interface); but everything else is - well, in a professional situation I cannot afford to take those risks.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

As long as you can, stick with 2007 and stay away from 2010. 2010 has replaced the menu system with a) 'the ribbon' which has a jumble of icons in a visual assault, highly distracting and making it hard to find anything, and b) give you a single huge button with the WINDOWS logo under which all menus are squished in a form that makes it take forever to find any one command. But you get to look at the Windows logo, so that's OK, I suppose?

[julesjones]

Thanks, that's worth knowing. I actually get on fine with 2003 at work, for values of "fine" not including the things that drive me to incoherent ranting if I have to do anything other than pre-formatted letters, and I don't see any reason to go for newer versions other than being able to read files from people who have the Newest! Shiniest! release. (My objection to Word isn't MSantipathy, it's just that the people who design Word have a completely different mental model of a document to the model I have.)

I've also found so far that I get on fine with using Dragon to control Word 2003. In my experience MS are actually fairly good about disability support, but I have to wonder how usable the ribbon in 2010 is if you use voice control systems.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I have no idea how 2010 would respond to commands - you can still assign keyboard shortcuts so I suppose there's a provision somehow - but my first reaction was What The Fuck and that never quite went away. It's kinda not too bad if you have a huge monitor, but on a laptop, too much screen estate goes to navigation. On the Mac, you a) still get menus and b) can hide the ribbon completely and set up your own custom pallets, so after about a day of wrangling it's mostly as functional as Word 2000 - but still not quite.

[threeoutside.livejournal.com]

I share your hatred of Word. I had to use it in my job (one of many, many, reasons I was ecstatic to retire in December. No lie. I don't have to use that piece of crap any more!) I'm a Mac Air owner now, and it comes with NeoOffice, which is the Mac version of Open Office, but lately the word processor has been dealing me fits, so I am learning to use Scrivener for all my word processing needs. I'll need to find a spreadsheet, though. The NeoOffice one is working OK for now but I expect it to start throwing tantrums any moment, like its brother the word processor.

Anyway, Just chiming in with support: Word needs to die and go to Hell.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I just want to commiserate. I hate Word as much as you do and I avoid using it wherever I can. At work, it's all there is. At least you can get Dragon to work with it! That is worth a lot of other annoyances, I think.

And let me second the harsh words for Word 2010. The ribbon is vicious. "Jumble" is too kind a word for the mess. Everything you need to actually enter and manipulate text is hidden: all you can see is a big display of all the different types of headers you might use.

A small annoyance is that they've shifted the default font to Calibri and so far all the screaming fights I've had with it have not allowed me to find out how to change the default font to Times New Roman, which it ought to be for our purposes. Another small annoyance is that it has set as a default that it skips lines whenever you hit Enter, and the place to change that is also hidden. It took two of us to find it, buried in an unlikely place.

Another thing about the new Word is that it saves in a new file format -- docx instead of doc -- and I am not sure about its compatibility with other things. I do know that when I go to attach a file to gmail, I cannot find it in the attachment dialog window: but that may be an issue with Windows 7. which was installed on the work computer at the same time (and which, as far as I can tell, exists almost solely to hide files from the user).

[agoodwinsmith.livejournal.com]

I have been forcibly upgraded at work to the Window trama set with all the ribbon menus. Boy, do we know whose development team was on crack while that was in progress, don't we.

I would like to add my voice to threeoutside's statement that Word needs to die and go to hell - but it must take all of Windows with it.