Office 2007 Sucks

[KLin]

Originally posted by: Anubis

Originally posted by: MrChad

Originally posted by: Xavier434

Originally posted by: Anubis

we tested it, better comps dont help our issue, we have spread sheets that are nearly maxed out, the extra cells that 2007 provide would be a benefit to us but the preformance hit we take with the same data and same calcs isnt worth the upgrade, granted we are prob a more specialized case but there are many others that work with huge data tables who also have this issue, its pretty well agreed upon that 2007 is really slow when working with alot of data, especially graphs, i can paste 200K+ cells at once and have a graph instantly refresh in 2003, that same operation took 8 min in 2007,

Well, in your case, I don't think the problem is 2007. Rather it is your company's choice in how they store that huge amount of data. When you are dealing with that much data you really should use a database instead of a spreadsheet since performance is an issue. From there, you can do many things with the data to produce reports, graphs, etc.

Well, that point aside, if 2007 takes significantly longer to perform the exact same task as 2003 I'd say there's something wrong. Perhaps there's a bug they've hit that will be corrected in a future patch.

EDIT: Anubis, Microsoft has a few performance tweaks that might help you.

we do use a database to store things, Access and a few others, prob is we need to do calcs and such on really large ammnts of data at once, which we cant do in access, 2003 works fine for this, but 2007 is slow, google up about it others expirence it also, hopefully they will patch it in the future, however seeing as we just went to 2003 in the past 6 months i dont see 2007 being implemented any time soon

Any calculation you do in excel can be done in Access, FYI. 🙂

 

[indamixx99]

I read somewhere you can disable the ribbon and go back to the menu system if you liked the old interface instead.

 

[dmcowen674]

You realize all you folks speaking negatively about the best Corporation on the planet will be labeled as Trolls by the Fanboi's and employees that frequent here.

How dare you say anything bad about the best software and operating system.

 

[Xavier434]

Originally posted by: KLin

Originally posted by: Anubis
we do use a database to store things, Access and a few others, prob is we need to do calcs and such on really large ammnts of data at once, which we cant do in access, 2003 works fine for this, but 2007 is slow, google up about it others expirence it also, hopefully they will patch it in the future, however seeing as we just went to 2003 in the past 6 months i dont see 2007 being implemented any time soon

Any calculation you do in excel can be done in Access, FYI. 🙂

Ya, I personally prefer to perform most of my bigger calculations outside of excel and then dump the results into the spreadsheet so I can take advantage of it's features such as producing graphs. Most of the time I just write something in .Net, but macros work too for some stuff. It's a good way to eliminate some of the bloat and get right to the chase when Office won't do exactly and only what you want it to do. On top of that, automating processes is always nice 🙂

 

[techs]

Originally posted by: indamixx99
I read somewhere you can disable the ribbon and go back to the menu system if you liked the old interface instead.

I haven't seen that.
btw I always change the default save properties back to .doc from .docx whenever I install office 2007

 

[secretanchitman]

i love 2007. its a MUCH needed change over the years...seriously. i couldnt believe how much easier it is to use.

though i dont really like vista...too much clicking and nonsense to go where i need.

 

[kevinthenerd]

Originally posted by: Xavier434

Originally posted by: Anubis

that may be true but you cant say possibily think that excel 2007 is better then 2003

i mean shit it takes it 10 min to do what excel 2003 does in 2

that is not an improvement

I have yet to experience this kind of issue yet but keep this in mind:

Just because something takes longer doesn't mean it is less powerful. It just might be that you do not need everything that it is doing when you click that shiny button. Office is not open source so we really do not know what is going on in the background for either 2003 or 2007. Now, one might call that bloat, but then again that same person would cry if they needed whatever it was doing later and then they come to find out it wasn't available. The way I always look at this kind of problem is that hardware almost always exceeds the requirements of software tools thanks to the gaming industry and its ability to push that hardware. We are currently looking at a rare case where some office tool software is giving today's hardware a run for its money. In due time, that won't be an issue. Most office environments do not need to run really large time sensitive tasks on a regular basis where this would be a problem anyways. Those that do can opt to stick with 2003 for now until they get better computers.

Are sheet recalculations faster in 2007? If not then count me out. I do some crazy stuff in my engineering studies (beyond my course work). Sometimes I wonder if scrapping the whole thing for custom code in C or FORTRAN would be the way to go. For anything more complicated than a screen-width of formula I stick with Mathcad.

 

[kevinthenerd]

Originally posted by: teclis1023
I agree with MrChad for the most part. I actually think that a lot of people don't understand how powerful Office software is because they have never been exposed to its higher-level functions because they're buried under menus and sub-menus.

In my case that's a ton of crap. I use Excel's goal seek and data analysis and all sorts of things that people rarely use. In Word I've been known to use the automatic figure labeling with objects and change tracking and custom themes and a bunch of other stuff. I insert objects and do scripting and all sorts of other things to make document changes easier. To not do so would be crazy when I work on 100 page reports for my classes. Office is definitely on the top of my list as far as applications and suites that I know best. That's way too much stuff to learn over again now that I've become so good at what I use now, and if some stupid bug makes me lose my most recent changes to a document, that's not worth all the features in the world.

 

[kevinthenerd]

Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
all about the $$ easier GUI'S can provoke less computer savvy people to purchase and use the product.

THANK YOU!

As I said, the n00bs are introduced into the fold with stuff that looks easier while the experienced users are forced to work in the new file format.

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: blurredvision

Originally posted by: ElFenix
the main selling factor of the new office is not the interface, it's the new file format that everyone will have to buy into.

I don't really have a dog in this fight, I just wanted to comment on this one line. It's true that the new file format will be the main selling factor in the future, but the XML-based files are much smaller and easily managed than their older counterparts. Atleast there is an incentive to use the new file format. A person with a ton of Office documents could easily cut the space used in half with the new format. That could save in costs for network traffic and storage space.

i guess the exchange server won't be full of so many documents being emailed back and forth (while the file server sits unused), but the reduction in traffic *probably* isn't worth licenses for any business large enough for the reduction to matter.

 

[kevinthenerd]

Originally posted by: Xavier434

Originally posted by: Anubis

we tested it, better comps dont help our issue, we have spread sheets that are nearly maxed out, the extra cells that 2007 provide would be a benefit to us but the preformance hit we take with the same data and same calcs isnt worth the upgrade, granted we are prob a more specialized case but there are many others that work with huge data tables who also have this issue, its pretty well agreed upon that 2007 is really slow when working with alot of data, especially graphs, i can paste 200K+ cells at once and have a graph instantly refresh in 2003, that same operation took 8 min in 2007,

Well, in your case, I don't think the problem is 2007. Rather it is your company's choice in how they store that huge amount of data. When you are dealing with that much data you really should use a database instead of a spreadsheet since performance is an issue. From there, you can do many things with the data to produce reports, graphs, etc.

When I was a research assistant, I had a lookup table to convert RGB to hue to avoid the trig calculation. My coworker set up a system in Access, but my code written in VB was a lot faster... by over 100 fold if I remember correctly. I simply loaded a three-dimensional array (64 megs IIRC) straight into ram by reading a random access file. Sometimes raw code is worth the extra effort.

 

[alkemyst]

I don't get a lot of this above...if one can program and require speed; code will smoke almost any prepackaged app that is trying to do 100's of other things you don't need.

How many 100's of page reports you having to write Kevin? 100's of pages is up there with a major thesis and dissertation....you going for a half dozen Master's/Ph.D's?

I am a pretty big power user of excel. Excel is written a bit for me, but mostly for the masses of office idiots.

I will need to play with 2k7 more, but MS usually leaves an opening to turn off things you don't want for speed over features.

 

[dmcowen674]

Originally posted by: techs

Originally posted by: Nocturnal

Originally posted by: techs
Notwithstanding the rest of the debate, what moron thought that leaving off the Quick Print button was good idea?
I literally have had to tell 10 people how to add it.

I know this is a minor annoyance but you can put it up there with the rest of the quick buttons if you go into the customize menu.

Its not such a minor annoyance when you own a computer shop and the calls keep coming in....

It's a feature :laugh:

 

[Jeff7]

Equation editor has gotten easier to access - it now has a huge button. But it's harder to use. It's less intuitive, and I can't tell if they tried to make it more helpful, or more convoluted. And when saving documents with equations to an older version of Word, it just converts the equations into images. Has the world of math changed so much in the last 7 years that things like fractions, radicals, and exponents can't be made backward-compatible?

Originally posted by: us3rnotfound
I totally agree. I watch as the teacher in my American Government class attempts to use Powerpoint 2007, and it took her 5 minutes to find out how to start the slide show from a certain slide (not from the beginning). In 2003, it was so intuitive that I don't even remember how one would do this, I'd just do it. Fuck the Office Button, Fuck the different tabs at the top.

That's a consistent problem I see - one of my classes is a speech class, and almost everyone who gives a Powerpoint presentation can't even find the button to start the thing. I know F5 does it, so if I'm tending the PC for the presentation, I just use that.
Starting it on a specific slide? Don't know.

Using it the first time, I couldn't find how to even save a file. I finally enticed that menu out of hiding using Alt+F. Traditionally, fancy animated logos in software just do absolutely nothing, other than provide a visual distraction. Now the animated logo actually does something.

I also hate the "adaptive" interfaces and menus which move your frequently-used features to the top. I like things to stay where they are - I remember where they are. When they move, I have to go looking for them. Maybe make the menus so that features can be moved by the user. Then I can put frequently-used features at easily accessible places, and they will STAY that way.

I still use Office 2000, and I really don't want to have to sidegrade to another version anytime soon. It'd be nice if OpenOffice were more usable and compatible with MS Office - I'd just switch to that. Unfortunately, it seems that it was made by Linux programmers, and they tend (tend, TEND, not always🙂) to make things even less intuitive than Microsoft.
For one class, I've been working with tables and Equation Editor a lot. Office 2007 makes them so much more difficult to use. Office 2000 feels like an intuitive breeze by comparison.

 

[her209]

I'm using Office 2007 on Windows Vista and its gawd awful slow connecting to the Exchange Server (2003) via RPC over HTTP.

ARGGGGG!!!!

 

[covert24]

Originally posted by: ElFenix
i don't like it, but people are already sending me docx files.

of course, most of the time i use wordperfect, so i can avoid the craptastic interface changes of office.

MS really has shot themselves in the foot with this last round of software. vista blows (why the fsck does IE crash when doing nothing?!?), and the new office interface is horrible. unfortunately they'll still sell billions of dollars of each merely because everyone has to buy it to keep up with the network.

Originally posted by: MrChad
Businesses are finding it difficult to justify Office suite upgrades these days, so I would venture to guess that MS made sure the new UI is easier to learn and more productive on average than previous UIs.

yup, the last versions of MS software were perfectly good, so MS has to find something to upgrade. i'll give you a hint: the main selling factor of the new office is not the interface, it's the new file format that everyone will have to buy into.

no one will have to buy into anything since office 07 can open and save regular .doc files. just a personal preference if you like the interface or not. i like it since its much more simplified.

 

[Markbnj]

A GUI is easier and just as powerful, but if you know the command line, it's pretty much physically impossible for the GUI equivalent to be faster.

I'm sure this assertion is pretty much guaranteed to be false in some cases, but I don't feel like thinking one up right now. The reason is that it doesn't matter, so why waste the calories? You sound like some old mechanic grousing about all the new thingamajigs and whirllygigs on car engines, without recognizing that they go 100k miles without a tune-up these days.

Cars have been around for 100 years or so, and you can pick any point on that timeline and find the same population of grizzled old romantics and pink-skinned wannabes reminiscing over the fabled complexities of twenty year-old technology. There is, in short, no difference between high tech luddites and any other kind.

 

[DBL]

Originally posted by: kevinthenerd

Originally posted by: Xavier434

Originally posted by: Anubis

we tested it, better comps dont help our issue, we have spread sheets that are nearly maxed out, the extra cells that 2007 provide would be a benefit to us but the preformance hit we take with the same data and same calcs isnt worth the upgrade, granted we are prob a more specialized case but there are many others that work with huge data tables who also have this issue, its pretty well agreed upon that 2007 is really slow when working with alot of data, especially graphs, i can paste 200K+ cells at once and have a graph instantly refresh in 2003, that same operation took 8 min in 2007,

Well, in your case, I don't think the problem is 2007. Rather it is your company's choice in how they store that huge amount of data. When you are dealing with that much data you really should use a database instead of a spreadsheet since performance is an issue. From there, you can do many things with the data to produce reports, graphs, etc.

When I was a research assistant, I had a lookup table to convert RGB to hue to avoid the trig calculation. My coworker set up a system in Access, but my code written in VB was a lot faster... by over 100 fold if I remember correctly. I simply loaded a three-dimensional array (64 megs IIRC) straight into ram by reading a random access file. Sometimes raw code is worth the extra effort.

What does that have to do with Access vs. Excel? You could do what you did in both Excel and Access using VBA. However, access would still be faster at reading your data from a table compared to reading the data from a worksheet. If you used neither method and created the data through code (which is what it seems you have done), then I think it would be a wash.

However, that does not change the fact that Access is much better for storing large quantities of data compared to excel. It's very common for people to use Excel when it would be much more beneficial to use Access.

 

[kevinthenerd]

Originally posted by: Markbnj

A GUI is easier and just as powerful, but if you know the command line, it's pretty much physically impossible for the GUI equivalent to be faster.

I'm sure this assertion is pretty much guaranteed to be false in some cases, but I don't feel like thinking one up right now. The reason is that it doesn't matter, so why waste the calories? You sound like some old mechanic grousing about all the new thingamajigs and whirllygigs on car engines, without recognizing that they go 100k miles without a tune-up these days.

Cars have been around for 100 years or so, and you can pick any point on that timeline and find the same population of grizzled old romantics and pink-skinned wannabes reminiscing over the fabled complexities of twenty year-old technology. There is, in short, no difference between high tech luddites and any other kind.

I'm more of a car guy than anything these days. I'm not half the computer geek I used to be. I've had this sort of conversation with more than one carburetor-lover.

On a good day with all the money and time in the world, fuel injection beats carburetion every time. (For a race engine with consistent environmental conditions, they're dead even, but as soon as the weather changes or if you want to throttle the motor below WOT, fuel injection's ability to consistently and precisely meter the fuel for the motor's requirements is what's important here.)

Now, imagine being a mechanic with no computer equipment and lots of experience tuning carburetors, including Holleys and Quadrajets. (To the absolute expert, the "Quadrajunk" was actually the best there was because of their ability to be tuned across a whole airflow range unlike the Holleys, but that's beside the point here.) The results of such a mechanic tuning a carburetor and a supercharger will be far superior to that same mechanic trying to fool around with turbochargers, injectors, high pressure lines, and, worst of all, the mass air flow, knock, and oxygen sensors.

Now, imagine a teenager growing up in today's society seeing his friends drive around in V-TEC Civics. With no legacy behind him, it's easy to dive into fuel injection and turbochargers. It's cheaper these days to mess around with fuel injection than it is to mess around with carburetors. Re-learning things sucks, but the merits of fuel injection are worth the effort. You can get better fuel economy (especially during startup) and better performance for a wider range of environmental and engine conditions. Plus, turbochargers are more efficient than superchargers and are capable of producing a greater amount of boost.

I don't see this same light at the end of the tunnel for the Office 2007 interface. I feel as though, even with lots of practice, it'll still be slower for me than the Office 2003 interface.

 

[WildViper]

I agree with the OP. I HATE this interface. I have seen it installed on a coworker's computer and it plain sucks in usability. I sat down on it and tried to do some things that I usually do. I couldn't find the damn buttons. I was spending too much time to find things.

I have Office 2003 and I am not going to upgrade. I have sent similar emails to my corporate tech people to let them know. They are morons as well for bringing this on.

Anyways, is there a way to switch the interface back to 2003???? THe other collegues want the old system back and rather than uninstall and re-install, this choice would have been nice.

in fact, why didn't MS give US the choice to go back???? We can save back to Word 97, so why can't we just change the interface back????

 

[Markbnj]

I don't see this same light at the end of the tunnel for the Office 2007 interface. I feel as though, even with lots of practice, it'll still be slower for me than the Office 2003 interface.

I've seen a lot of reports that it's actually faster, and in general I give MS pretty high marks for UI design. But my comment was really more general and targeted at command line nostalgia (and for the record, my first personal computer was a Tandy CoCo in 1981, so the command line and I have a long relationship). Whether Office 2007 will be successful remains to be seen, I guess, but I give them points for a ballsy redesign, anyway. I admit I still fall into "where the hell is that" holes when I would otherwise be flying along in the old version. But some other things, like rollover style preview, I like a lot.

 

[Brazen]

This is why I author all my documents in Notepad2 😀

 

[piasabird]

I develop reports with Excel and Pivot Tables and I think that Excel 2007 is a vastly improved interface. It did take me a few days to get use to it. I do not like the Outline view for the pivot tables so I found that if you change the options to Classic View it defaults to Tabular form and looks almost like Excel 2007.

Excel 2007 can support more rows for better Database Access. This is what we use it for. I also found that when you go from Excel 2007 to Excel 2003 it has a definite asthetic advantage in Access 2007. It is like going back to a lousy black and white TV. I think perhaps you are a bunch of people stuck in Old Phogie mode.

Out with the old and in with the new!

I do have some issues with Word. I dont like how some things work for Mail Merge. Seems like it does not work that well. I could not get it to preview properly.

 

[Scooby Doo]

YUCK 2007 sucks. Give me the menu back. It's takes longer just to do anything than before. Hopefully 2008 will bring back classic mode at least.

What they don't have "Write a letter for me" wizard? :roll:

 

[blurredvision]

Originally posted by: ElFenix

Originally posted by: blurredvision

Originally posted by: ElFenix
the main selling factor of the new office is not the interface, it's the new file format that everyone will have to buy into.

I don't really have a dog in this fight, I just wanted to comment on this one line. It's true that the new file format will be the main selling factor in the future, but the XML-based files are much smaller and easily managed than their older counterparts. Atleast there is an incentive to use the new file format. A person with a ton of Office documents could easily cut the space used in half with the new format. That could save in costs for network traffic and storage space.

i guess the exchange server won't be full of so many documents being emailed back and forth (while the file server sits unused), but the reduction in traffic *probably* isn't worth licenses for any business large enough for the reduction to matter.

You're probably right, I just wanted to comment on what I've observed. I only use Word to type up simple stuff like resumes and junk, that why I said that I don't have any reason to be in this discussion. It may not be cost efficient to upgrade right now, but assuming they [Microsoft] stick with the docx format for years to come (I don't see why they wouldn't), the reduced file size is a welcome addition.

Oh well, that's just getting off topic a little bit, though. 🙂 Everyone can go back to their regularly scheduled topic.