Microsoft Office 2007 Professional Edition (PC)

Don't think about using this for technical writing.

Besides the more general problems with Office 2007 (such as the greater time spent looking for various operations on all of the different menu tabs, the greatly reduced ability to customise the toolbars) there are big specific problems with technical writing.

1) Biggest problem: There are many journals that will not accept the docx format. Word 2007 CAN NOT save manuscripts in 'regular' .doc format, only a pseudo .doc format. For instance, equations are saved as uneditable graphics images. This is also unacceptable for writing journal articles, as well as sharing documents with other colleagues who do not use Office 2007.

2) Cross-hatching and stripping are indispensable for technical graphics, and have all been removed from Powerpoint.

3) I generally make graphs and plots with Excel and then cut and paste into Powerpoint in order to convert the plots into publication-quality images. For some reason when you do this with Office 2007 (which is much harder to do now), you end up with multiple objects that cannot be ungrouped.

I am not a Microsoftophobe and was quite happy with Office 2003, which I re-installed. My big worry is that at some point in time Microsoft will stop supporting 2003 and I'll have to move to OpenOffice or some other solution.

Accept it will take some getting used to if you are used to using Office.
Accept it is set out differently.
Accept, it is easier to use once you have used it a few times - everything is set out for you. Many of the features are now more accessible - once you've got used to the new format !
I like this version. A real pain in the butt when transferring between older versions of the Office packages - as you have to manually save it in compatibility mode or it is unreadable. But other than these few inconvieniences - I like it and prefer it. It does not take too long to get used to, but you do have to use it to learn it ! :) !

No stars. I can only repeat what others have said about the inaccessibility and inflexibility of the command menus. A totally unnecessary revision and a complete waste of money. It is now uninstalled from my computer. Don't buy this awful product - stay with Office 2003 or try OpenOffice which is free.

When i first used this program at school, i was like OK... let me ask the technicians if they can reinstall the old office. Omg its just horrible, every-things out of place and theirs no way of changing it back to the old style. If office was designed for people who cant read or wright this is what it would look like, but then that defeats the object of WORD!! ITS JUST A USELESS AND I MEAN ABSOLUTELY USELESS UPDATE LIKE WINDOWS VISTA DON"T BUY IT!!!! If however you like shiny blue interfaces that would make AOL proud, and want to learn a whole new program that you already no how to use. This is the program for you and only for umm... £349.98, well thats really cheap isn't it, i actually cant believe its as cheap as photoshop cs3, and also we added an extra function - the use up all of your processor so you cant use anything else when your running office function.

I recently bought a student version of this package for my son who needed to use Microsoft publisher for his school work. I already had Office 97 professional and for me this has been adequate.

This product adds nothing of value that I can see, but totally changes the appearance of the user interface making it that more difficult to use as you do not know where to find things.

Worse than this there are two serious flaws which are going to influence me to uninstall this software.

1. If you download some word files, written in an older version of Word (97-2003) some of the symbols are not interpreted properly. This happended to me when I downloaded some maths exam papers. Symbols such as square roots are substituted for other characters.

2. If you have two versions of Office installed, every time you click on an office document, the software will take at least a minute initializing, before it can load both itself and the document in question. There have also been many instances where the software has crashed and a report is sent off to microsoft. This happens alot when you open office documents online. So most of the time I download and save the document first before reading.

I am thinking of removing this software from my computer, now that my son has his own laptop. If there are any further problems, that will be his problem.

For those of you thinking of buying this software, my advice to you would be don't. You would be much better off downloading OpenOffice from the Internet and using this instead. It is, as far as I can tell compatible with Microsoft Office, is free, and easier to use. It also includes useful features such as the ability to convert Word documents to pdf format etc.