Love or hate Microsoft Word/Powerpoint 2007/2010?

[MichelleHW101]

I can’t stand the new version of Word or Powerpoint.  I can never find what I need and I have to constaly put the icons I need into the quick acess bar because I can’t find them in those stupid ribbons.  Bring me back the original!  Oh and in Powerpoint I can’t free draw anymore.  Those stupid edit points are curved and you can’t just moved one without screwing up the whole shape.  I’m constantly on help to try and figure out how to do stuff that I used to know by heart how to do on the original.  Why did Microsoft feel the need to change a good thing?  Kindda like going from XP to Vista.  Thank God for Windows 7.

[kapeh12]

I'm definitely not a fan of that ribbon bar.  I don't know who decided where to put all the functions, but me and other co-workers have no idea what logic pattern was used because it makes no sense to us.  I've been using 2007 for 2 years now and I still can't remember where they stuck the common functions that used to reside nicely on the 2003 version's top toolbars.  << sigh >>  I use Excel a lot, and still can't remember which ribbon tab they stuck the macro tab - we use that a lot, and it's in the least logical tab.  I always surf back and forth because it's that illogical I never hit the correct tab on the first try.

I've heard some people have the ability to switch the view from ribbon back to the old version with some extra installation, unfortunately I don't have that option.   

[dbsaus1]

I have used only 2007 & 2010 and have little experiance on previous versions. I am experianced enough that I believe I could adjust if I had to,but I would prefer not to.
 
 

 

[L4v4]

To me it's all the same, as long as it works is all good to me. 

[lvstephanie]

I agree that the new format is much more difficult to work with.  I think they were trying to merge the menu with the toolbar to make the menu system a little more user friendly, but I think it actually backfired on them. The old toolbars allowed the user to have all of their common buttons showing at the same time; before if I wanted to make a heading by bolding the text and indenting it, I could do so with a couple of clicks on the toolbars. But now, I have to click the Home ribbon-tab (if it's not already there), click on the Bold text, click on the Page Format ribbon, and finally click on the Indent button. Newer versions are supposed to increase productivity, but it seems like the new version actually detract from that. I remember the first time I used it, it took me over an hour to find the "Print..." function... I didn't realize the Microsoft symbol was actually another tab. 

And don't get me started on Excel... being a programmer, I have to write a bunch of programs that have to read data out of an Excel spreadsheet. For example I may write a program that reads data for a user-entered store, and my program will create a config. sheet for that particular store. However there has never been a good way to read data out of a spreadsheet if a column of data has a mix of both numbers and text data. For example the serial number of a computer may be comprised of 7 alpha-numeric characters. This means that one system could have all numbers while a second has a mix of letters and numbers. When Excel comes to these "mixed type" columns, it determines the data-type by a majority of the type based off of the first 8 rows (yeah, I know... 8 only?!) So if your rows are sorted by Serial Number and you have several hundred rows of data, the first 8 rows will all be numeric so Excel will report all data in that column as numeric -- and any text-data in that column will be sent back as NULL (or no data). To make matters worse, numeric data longer than 11 digits are converted into scientific notation (so you're SOL if you are putting in a long S/N or a 12-digit MAC Address without any octet separators). And finally numbers only retain up to 15 significant digits; thus a 16-digit number would have the first 15 digits followed by a zero. These number issues also occur if you try to open a CSV file directly by double-clicking it instead of importing the text-data and ensuring that you assign each row as text data instead of numeric data. With all of these issues (that could easily be resolved if Excel reported every unknown data-type as a variable-length string) it boggles the mind that MS would spend time addressing formatting "issues" (which as mentioned above created more problems than it solved) instead of fixing an issue that MANY programmers and data-entry personnel have repeatedly griped about. 

[Joeyramone]

Word always changes something... and it is usually annoying.  I like that the toolbar is less busy, but it is so small now it is hard to find the tools.

I never liked PowerPoint... it always had the look of a children's presentation, especially with those cheesy stock photos.