Office 2007 is Retarded

andyb · Post by **andyb** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 5:07 am

It seems that Microshit dont want to sell a copy of Microshit Orifice 2007 WITH an installation disc, this means that Orifice has to be downloaded from M$ after you have spent the money buying a bit of cardboard wrapped in cellophane with that precious serial number inside.

Once you have waited for the serial No. to turn up you can then download and install Orifice onto the PC, one has to ask why M$ is doing this, its utterly retarded, and I can only see M$ loosing money on this rather than making more money.

Its actually easier to steal a copy than buy it and then download it, and of course you dont have to pay for it either. The less illegal ways are to use an older version of Orifice, or just download OpenOffice, which has as much functionality, downloads in a fraction of the time, installs in 3 minutes and is FREE.

Congratulations M$ you have just lost Â£120 becuase you are idiots.

Andy

PS: This doesnt apply to the the "FR" version. "FR" is not the French version, but the "Financial Rape" version, AKA the "Retail Version" that costs Â£280 for the "M$ Orifice 2007 Basic"...... yes thats the copy that gives you Word, Excel and Outlook...... thats it, were you expecting more for your money.

mb2 · Post by **mb2** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 7:52 am

you see, this is why you should just stick with office 97. low resources, no phoning home, u don't have to adapt to a new way of doing things every couple of years.. does the job. its not like they've made great advances in the last 10 years.
and if u need to open something saved in a newer version of office, just use openoffice.

Sooty · Post by **Sooty** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 11:24 am

I was reading that Word-07 is in a different file format? If you send that to someone with Office-2003, will they be able to open it? And vice versa?

|Romeo| · Post by **|Romeo|** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 1:06 pm

Sooty wrote:I was reading that Word-07 is in a different file format? If you send that to someone with Office-2003, will they be able to open it? And vice versa?

There is a new format, but it is incredibly easy to tame it to using the old one (a distinct lack of nag screens telling you that the new one is so much better and you really should use it because x,y,z). I believe that there is a patch for old versions of office to allow them to use the new formats which works with everthing back as far as office 2000 (possibly 97, I can't remember, although I doubt it). I fell in love with the new interface after half an hour with a beta version, and can't imagine going back (it annoys me greatly that Onenote 2007 does not have the ribbon interface).

Andyb, I don't know where you bought it from, but home and student sells for Â£90 or less and swaps Outlook for Onenote (and comes in a ridiculous plastic package). No use if you are a business of course, but if you are large enough to care about that then you are probably on volume licensing anyway.

andyb · Post by **andyb** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 1:17 pm

Orifice 2007 has been requested alongside Vista by a customer, on a new PC they want us to build for them.

I dont have any problem with Vista, but the customer is only after Word and Excel, but they are not a Student or Teacher, so they are going to have to spend the extra Â£30 for the "Basic" version.

I will suggest that they use Open Office as its FREE and does everything they need to do.

Andy

ciz28 · Post by **ciz28** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 3:17 pm

To each, his own, I suppose. Personally, I'm starting to get fairly used to Office 2007 at work and at home. I have no first hand experience with actually purchasing it through retail chains, though, since it is provided to me through work

Regarding the new file format, I know at least Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all have the option of saving in the old format as well as the new format. I kind of like the new format as it tends to be about half the size for most of my documents, and it's interesting to browse through the file contents

|Romeo| · Post by **|Romeo|** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 4:09 pm

andyb wrote:Orifice 2007 has been requested alongside Vista by a customer, on a new PC they want us to build for them.

I dont have any problem with Vista, but the customer is only after Word and Excel, but they are not a Student or Teacher, so they are going to have to spend the extra Â£30 for the "Basic" version.

Andy

The licensing changed with 2007, anyone who is not a business is eligble for home and student see http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/suite ... 1732621033 under pricing and ordering:

Do I need to have a student in my household in order to qualify to purchase and use Office Home and Student 2007?

No.

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 6:53 pm

Hello,

I don't know why more people use don't OpenOffice? It can open and save to M$ Office formats, but is easier to use, IMO. You can use it for free, or you can donate what you think is fair.

Heck, I installed Ubuntu, which is a very nice flavor of Linux (which is free, natch) and it includes OO -- why are we using M$ products?

Happy Hopping · Post by **Happy Hopping** » Fri Feb 23, 2007 12:41 am

mb2 wrote:you see, this is why you should just stick with office 97. low resources, no phoning home, u don't have to adapt to a new way of doing things every couple of years.. does the job. its not like they've made great advances in the last 10 years.
and if u need to open something saved in a newer version of office, just use openoffice.

Ditto. I don't see what big changes orifice has made at all. I'm still using Excel 2000, the only reason I upgrade from 97 is due to the Y2K bug. And I don't use other orifice components, I stick w/ WP Ver 12

nick705 · Post by **nick705** » Fri Feb 23, 2007 2:27 am

|Romeo| wrote:I fell in love with the new interface after half an hour with a beta version, and can't imagine going back (it annoys me greatly that Onenote 2007 does not have the ribbon interface).

Yes, I have to grudgingly admit the ribbon is a vast improvement over endless cascading menus, and it's difficult to go back to the old way after using it for a while.

If you're not using Office all day every day though, it's hard to justify the cost when OpenOffice gives you so much for free.

|Romeo| · Post by **|Romeo|** » Fri Feb 23, 2007 4:03 am

I've just realised that I haven't yet taken this oportunity to grumble about the lack of tabs in the ribbon interface. The rest of it is stilll good, but it should have tabs.

Spare Tire · Post by **Spare Tire** » Fri Feb 23, 2007 4:42 am

I've tried open office. People say it can open and save in the word format but that's doesn't seem to be true in my case. It does open and save, except some of my formatting dissapears or is not the same. I'd gladly use it if weren't like that. It's also one of the reason i'm not switching to linux just yet. Dipped a toe into the water but it was too cold.

floffe · Post by **floffe** » Fri Feb 23, 2007 4:21 pm

When it comes to basic formatting, OpenOffice usually manages 99% or so (headers, footers, text-boxes, drawings, tables, ...), but if you use more advanced stuff it's not perfect (which is not their fault, since Microsoft won't release their specifications).

One thing about OpenOffice that is vastly superior to the one in MS Office is the equation editor, you can actually type in your stuff instead of going through 15 sub-menus to find the particular thing you are looking for (you still have the option of going through those sub-menus though, but you can avoid it).