Microsoft Office Standard 2007

Citation

Pitta, D.A. (2009), "Microsoft Office Standard 2007", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 26 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcm.2009.07726dag.001

Microsoft Office Standard 2007

Article Type: Computer currency From: Journal of Consumer Marketing, Volume 26, Issue 4

Edited by Dennis A. Pitta, University of Baltimore

Recently our employer upgraded to the new Microsoft Office: Microsoft Office Standard 2007. Instead of the usual incremental improvement of a piece of software, Microsoft delivered a suite of programs that appear to be something brand new. That is both good and bad. The new program has completely different interfaces and new file formats. Word users who created .doc files with familiar command menus now generate .docx files that older versions of Office like Microsoft Office 2000 and Microsoft Office XP cannot read. In addition, the new interface is so different that using the program requires a steep learning curve. In reality it is a steep unlearning curve, since the complaints we heard focused on familiar commands and menus which had disappeared into a new and unfamiliar landscape. The program seems to generate a severe emotional response from experienced users.

There are many good points, but Office 2007 presents some serious learning challenges. Some of the good changes include improvements in the output from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Office 2007 can produce polished documents and presentations. Users of Outlook will value its new scheduling abilities. Professionals who need attractive reports, charts, and slide shows will value the upgrade. Experienced users will have to feel their way around the new interface and that should lower productivity at the beginning. Veterans will have to endure a bout of learning the new and unlearning the old. In contrast, novices may have an easier time since they only have to learn, not unlearn.

That unlearning requirement is troubling. Some users still have the choice of avoiding the upgrade entirely, although we did not. However, even those of us who stay with an older version of Office will experience the bite of the beast of incompatibility. Already some of my colleagues have sent Word files in the new .docx format as e-mail attachments to others who could not read them. Everyone else is not obliged to upgrade, since Microsoft provides a conversion tool so that older Office versions will be able to open Office 2007’s default, Open XML files. The ensuing requests to send readable versions seem to be decreasing as 2007 users become more sensitive to the problem.

Office versions

Microsoft offers several versions of Office. We have access to Microsoft Office Standard 2007. It costs $399 or one can upgrade from a previous version for $239. This particular suite includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and Office Tools that provide some useful functions. It does not include the Access database nor the Groove collaboration tool. Home users can buy Office Home & Student at $149. There is a Basic package, with Word, Excel, and Outlook, but it only comes pre-installed on new computers. Microsoft Office Small Business 2007 costs $449.95/$279.95 and includes the programs in the Standard edition plus Accounting Express 2008 and Publisher 2007, but once again, not Access. The Professional edition ($499.95/$329.95) includes the programs in Small Business plus the Access 2007 database program. The next version, Ultimate, costs $679 or $539 for the upgrade. Ultimate editions include the Groove 2007 collaboration tool as well as the InfoPath 2007 data gathering/electronic form program.

Setup

Setup was straightforward and automatic. Our technical wizards installed the default configuration in no more than 20 minutes on a computer running Windows XP with 2 GB of memory. Customizing took longer, as we expected. We wanted a lean installation and knew ahead of time what we needed and what we did not. New users or individuals at home would benefit from information about what one loses by not installing a component. After selecting the components we wanted, the installation went very quickly.

One reason that the University of Baltimore chose Office Standard 2007 is that it will run on either Windows XP or Vista. The plan is to upgrade our computers to Vista-capable systems later. Someone decided that users would be forced to familiarize themselves with the new interface and we would avoid the shock of a dual change to 2007 and Vista at the same time. To run 2007 on an XP machine, one needs Windows XP SP2 on a 500 MHz processor with at least 256 MB of RAM.

Interface

The interface is the primary change that will be apparent and may stymie some users. It is blue and brighter than the 2003 version. Each component uses a tabbed ribbon toolbar instead of the familiar drop-down menus and dialog boxes. One reviewer noted that that familiar interface is familiar since it has been used in Office suites from the very beginning, a period of over 20 years. Now it is gone.

The new interface rearranges commands in an unfamiliar and non-intuitive manner. We mentioned above that veteran users would have problems with the “improvements”. Microsoft has essentially pushed and compressed existing commands into smaller containers. For example, the Office logo in the upper left corner contains a menu. It holds commands from the old File and Edit menus. The new menu tabs come in two flavors. One is a set of always-on tabs; the other is a set of contextual tabs that hide until the software detects that you need them.

Despite the obvious difficulty that the interface presents to experienced users, it is not completely rigid. Users can customize the application programs somewhat. The Quick Access Toolbar allows users to add buttons according to their preferences, but there are limits to the changes one can make. There is something of importance to aid us, though: keyboard shortcuts remain the same as in 2003.

Programs

Word 2007

One neat improvement focuses on the look of the product the program produces. Microsoft spent considerable effort to make documents, spreadsheets, and presentations more attractive and professional. It integrated a measure of desktop publishing functionality into its programs. For example, users can adjust the brightness of images, as well as add effects like shadows and highlights to pictures. In addition, Word 2007 adds new templates, preformatted styles, and SmartArt diagrams that allow users to professionalize documents with images and charts. The tools are useful but are not equal to those found in desktop publishing programs.

For co-authors, Word 2007 provides a new tool that remedies errors in using Track Changes. There is now a method of comparing document drafts side by side to spot differences and changes, despite whether track changes was used. Parenthetically, that feature helped one of our lawyers detect a subtle change in the draft of a contract on which he and another lawyer collaborated. Our academic colleagues will value the new Review tab. It has pull-down menus of footnotes, citations, and tables of content.

PowerPoint 2007

Academics now serve a group of students termed “the millennials”. They are those who grew up after the Cold War ended, and during the age of the internet. Millennials accuse academics of inflicting pain on them with endless PowerPoint slideshows. That may be true for this market segment, but the look of PowerPoint 2007 presentations is quite improved. It boasts new templates that are more attractive and more three-dimensional than those of older versions.

Professionals who depend on upon professional-looking slide shows in their businesses will find PowerPoint 2007 worth the upgrade price.

Excel 2007

Our testers agreed that Excel benefits from the new ribbon layout. It makes the program more useful for working with complex spreadsheets. Now one can make complex and deeper data sorts than in the past. Microsoft now touts that users can work with a million rows of data, which is far in excess of our needs. We have not investigated this yet but Excel charts are supposed to be cleaner and more attractive.

Outlook 2007

Outlook 2007 has some valuable improvements. It features a search feature, Instant Search, which allows searching through e-mail messages, calendar entries, to-do items, and contacts and is very effective. It also has a built in protection against junk mail and phishing scams. The program now disables suspicious links before they can cause damage.

Experienced users will appreciate the Outlook composition window that opens e-mail attachments from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with all of the formatting options.

Support

Microsoft offers 90 days of free tech support with a toll-free phone number between 5.00 am and 9.00 pm Pacific time on weekdays, and 6.00 am-3.00 pm on weekends. After the 90-day period, telephone and e-mail support costs $49 per incident. In fairness, Microsoft’s online help is excellent, so users may be able to avoid the support fees. One reason that technical support has been exported to India and The Philippines is its high cost. Microsoft seems to just be passing on that cost.

Microsoft does provide some aid for us veterans in the form of Command Reference Guides, which cover where commands have moved since Office 2003. There is also free support available from the Microsoft Office online community. One other nice feature is the Microsoft Office Diagnostics utility, which is supposed to detect and repair problems with Office.

Conclusion

We had no choice in upgrading to Microsoft Office 2007; it was a computer czar’s decision. However, despite the extra work in sleuthing the new location of familiar commands, the upgrade was worth it. Part of that statement is based on the inevitability of change. Part is based on the benefits of the new upgrade. To be completely honest, several of us bought new personal laptop computers which came equipped with Vista and Office 2007. Thus we experienced some of the changes in advance of the University upgrade so the changes were not completely shocking.

Each of us will find different levels of value in each of the component programs. For the “glass half empty” crowd, there is much to gripe about. For those of us who are “glass half full”, there is much to like. For new users there is nothing to think about; the suite is well integrated, pretty and functional.

Many thanks to those who participated in completing this review: Brandon Scherr, Marshall Goldberg, Dawn Taylor, Erin Wilhelm, and Ewan Simpson.