That theme vs. template issue is hysterical.

Microsoft is *definitely* in a risky position right now. I mean, all this ferment in the blogosphere -- for example, Shelly Palmer's "Cracked Windows" -- it's adding up.

No wonder Gates is jumping ship.

Allie

Bob, I think you're probably guessing right.

I haven't tried it myself (nor have I upgraded to Office 2007 yet; ironically, Microsoft's Team Foundation Server, which I use for one of my development projects, requires Office 2003) but an enterprising developer has come up with a way to show the classic menus in Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007:

http://www.addintools.com/english/menuoffice/default.htm

Google is heeding your call today by adding presentations to its Apps suite: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/04/17/HNgooglepresentationapp_1.html

Bob,

Don't forgot that the Office suite is now becoming more squarely targeted at the top end of town, too.

If you want to access a lot of the most exciting features in Office 2007 (mainly centering around collaboration), you also need:

... the Professional or Enterprise versions of Office
... Windows Server 2003
... Microsoft Exchange 2007
... Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server 2007
... Microsoft Live Communications Server 2007

so it's all about delivering an end-to-end enterprise solution, with an appropriately enterprise-sized price tag.

Is there an option to go back to the old "classic" interface in Office 2k7?

I tried the beta, found the new interface so counterproductive, I would not recommend the upgrade to any one. It was taking minutes to just find a command or format or tool that used to take seconds.

I call it "The chrome on the Car Syndrome" (all show, no go). I have this "thing" called a "value added filter." I argue (respectfully, of course) that if something doesn't add value, why are resources being allocated to/for it? That's probably where "WOMBAT" (Waste of Money, Brains, and Time/Talent) came from.

Even worse? I wanted to buy a copy of the 2003 version of Office off a local retail shelf *3-days* after the retail release of Office 2007. It was impossible. All the retailers had pulled all existing copies of the 2003 versions from their shelves and refused to even check whether or not they had actually been returned to Microsoft.

I have ONE user stuck with the 2007 version. Fortunately I was able to set the default file formats to be compatible with the rest of the 2003 formats. I found this to be small compensation for the aggravation.

"You could make the case that the old interface was too confusing. You could, but you'd be unconvincing, because confusing or not, it was familiar to tens of millions of experienced users. By definition, a change as radical as the one we're facing is much more confusing, and to no good purpose"

The same thing could have been said many years ago, when WordPerfect still ruled the roost in going from a strictly DOS-based word processor to one with something of a graphical look to it (quick, who remembers what happened when you pressed Ctrl-F4?).

Change is inevitable, with a little use, you'll get used to it Bob.

A funny thing has happened since Vista/Office 2007 was released: not a single employee has yet asked me when we plan to upgrade our office computers. I've been around for 97/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003, and it was inevitable that within 2-3 weeks of a new release, some employees had the new version at home, liked the changes, and started asking for the same versions at work.

I downloaded and tried Office 2007, and disliked it greatly. The first issue is that there are so many damned menus and tool bars around the work space that even on our typical 19" LCD monitor, it feels like you are back to 14" CRTs.

Both myself and the other person evaluating it felt that it was just plain distracting and would likely lower productivity. It reminded me of a small child saying "look at me, look at me!".

MS seems to think that the work is formatting and reformatting the document, not creating the content. Our company, probably like many others, provides templates for common tasks so the formats are standardized and users don't waste time doing what Office 2007 tries to suck them into doing.

"Change is inevitable, with a little use, you'll get used to it"

OK, here is an inevitable change. More and more people are figuring out that "upgrading" to a new software just because it's there is not a good reason to upgrade. That's a new way of doing business, but change is inevitable. With a little practice, even Microsoft might get used to it.

Yeah, change is inevitable. But not pointless, counter productive change brought on voluntarily. Anyone who accuses people in this field as being "uncomfortable with change" has got to be a few cards short of a full deck. Our professional lives are loaded with change. But there is such a thing as a change for the worse.

I've used the new O2k7 for about a month now and, after finding everything I used before, I actually like it much better than 2003. You may rant about all the other products for the Office Enterprise but Sharepoint services is free with Server 2003 and it works great with O2k7. Well worth the change.

I have one new user that I've tried to help with Word 2007 - and I couldn't even find the "help"!
I agree with Bob - why require the millions of current users to learn a whole new GUI in order to continue doing their jobs?
I think the number of users has changed significantly since the changeover from Dos to Windows, so that change doesn't even compare. So I suggesting that "you'll get used to it" is not a good suggestion - I think switching to a non-MS alternative is better!

A few people have commented here that "change is inevitable" as if that answers any objection. I am going to avoid commenting about the knee jerk insanity of such a statement and will try to give a better viewpoint to look at this type of issue.

(Ignoring computers used at homes: toys, entertainment, education, etc...)
A computer being used at work is NOT a piece of office equipment. It IS a business process. Someone who changes their business processes without a clear idea of how the change will improve the business is insane. If it doesn't accomplish work or something else of value to the company it is of no use to a business.

As consumers people are largely like raccoons. They like shiny things. Give them something shiny and the brains turn off, the eyes roll back in the head, and you can almost hear the "gimee, gimee, gimee..." in the air. The truth is that Vista and Office 2007 are basically just designed to be eye candy and 'different' for no reason other then to attract customers. The sad part is I am certain that people will continue to 'upgrade' for no reason other then to satisfy an unthinking need for something new.

Microsoft's willingness to turn its back on millions of paying customers is very disturbing. Here you have millions of people relying on your products and you change the way it works for no reason other then to make a change. Any other company would treat the average person's familiarity with their products to be an asset of unbelievable value. Instead they have made unchanged functionality so it is unfamiliar. They can't even claim that it is easier or more intuitive.

I guess I am missing the part where I am supposed to want to give them my money...

After using Office 2007 for about a month now, I'm a fan of the new UI. The ribbon expands and shrinks to fit the window size, and makes better use of text, and icons to present options. There's better hover-over help.

Contrast with the mishmash of meaningless floating/docked icons in toolbars of previous versions. Bash MS all you want, but they're right on this call: it was long past time to rein in the toolbar mess. The new UI makes much better use of screen real estate than the old menu/toolbar structure.

There are a lot of small touches that add up, such as the zoom slider. And MS finally(!) put some real improvements into Outlook views.

What I can't figure out is why they didn't put this much effort into the Vista interface. In fact, Vista is such a disappointment, I'm considering switching--but to Leopard and Mac:Office 2008, which should have some of the same ribbon improvements.

Each release of Office (and Windows) is worse than the previous. Microsoft seems to have jumped the shark around the turn of the century.

New millenium, new software vendor.

I run openSUSE. OpenOffice is a fantastic alternative to Microsoft *. I will not use the Microsoft OS nor will I use the Microsoft suite of office tools again... there's no reason.
By the way, if the format is closed (MP3, Flash) I don't need it... period. If its DRM I don't buy it period. If its not open and free (as in Freedom) I don't use it--- End of Story.

MS redesigned Office in part using huge volumes of user-behaviour data. They have this data because, when you install Office, you are asked if you will share your user-behaviour data to help MS improve the user experience. I think this means they got to see which functions people use, how often etc, but not the actual files that people were working on.

From this, they concluded that 98% of people only use the default installation (they say that "fewer than 2% of Office 2003 users customize their UI according to the data reported through the Customer Experience Improvement Program").

From that, they concluded that they should make all of Office's functions easier to access and understand. They also disregarded what they saw as the small minority of users who customise their interface - you can't customise ribbons in the way you could every other Office version.

The flaw in this is obvious: the vast majority of people who will agree to MS seeing their data are people who don't know what they are doing.

But the result is that MS has changed the interface to suit users who don't know what they are doing, and ignored the way that more experienced users use it.

As far as I know, MS have literally no idea how representative their sample is, and they actually defending their sample as including "power users". Unbelievable.

Read these:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/05/568947.aspx
http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/10/14/66

I assume that when you talk about alternatives, the top item on your list is OpenOffice.org.

Allow me to add a couple of bullet points.

It will run on three different operating systems, Windows, Mac and Linux.

It will not cost you any more than the time to pull it down and install it.

It provides native output to the .ods format, which some government units are beginning to require.

Opps, that's three

Seeing that Office 2007 Student-Teacher no longer contained Outlook, I rushed out and bought the Office 2003 version on the last day before Office 2007 release. The clerks thought I was crazy.

This is classic 'baby duck' syndrome. The first interface you learn you love and all other interfaces are an insult to nature. I have installed Office 2007 though we remain in the office with 2003 because of our core application.
The ribbon is new and different, but if you work with it for a while it is indeed much more powerful and convenient than the old menu structure.
As pointed out you can switch the to the old menu but why would you want to? Would we willingly go back to Wordperfect, or even Wordstar?

Microsoft is clearly clueless when it comes to the impact of their changes on big business processes, or in even understanding those processes.

Remember when documents created with Word97 were incompatable with previous versions of Word? In fact, Word97 couldn't even open documents created with earlier versions. The fact that a major software upgrade like that could be released without testing extensive enough to identify that gargantuan flaw, especially when a huge portion of hte entire world is dependent on their products, was inexcusable. Apparently, Microsoft only creates new documents and never revises anything, whereas, most businesses use standard templates (as others have pointed out) or simply revise existing old reports and save with the new data they contain. The goof became apparent within days of its rollout and a panicing Microsoft shortly issued a patch that enabled Word97 to open documents created with previous versions.

Now to Vista, and a repeat of this behavior. Basic man-machine interface says:
1) Make how to accomplish the task intuitively obvious (which is what GUI was originally supposed to do), and
2) If you can't accomplish that, at least standardize so that once learned, processes can be reliably repeated by the operator.

Vista and Office have managed to violate both of these basic tenents. The interface is still not intuitive and it's no longer standardized. The indirect costs to business of having employees' productivity grind to a halt while they try to figure out how to accomplish tasks that were formerly routine in the last version are HUGE. And if corporations don't invest in retraining to teach everyone how to conduct work using the new interfaces (which is MORE money spent), then they risk the employees resorting to using low productivity work arounds (like carriage returns and tabs) to accomplish what they need to do.

Microsoft hobbles everything again.

Its pretty patronizing to call frustration over this "baby duck syndrome".

I've been using Excel for over 13 years. Why should I have to learn a totally new approach just because of some flawed market research by Microsoft?

Every time I get a new PC I customize the buttons and menus to be exactly how I want them. I get rid of the default buttons that I never use, add all the buttons I do use, and add menu items that I need (e.g. links to spreadsheets that I use all the time). I have over 100 buttons showing in Excel, including buttons calling simple macros that I have written, and any functions that I use frequently, that I have dragged out of Excel's menus.

I know where everything is, and most importantly, if I find myself using a function a lot, I can add it as a new button. Most of the functions I use on a daily basis are within one click, or a keyboard shortcut, and I don't get bothered by functions I don't use, because I take them out.

From what I understand of ribbons, none of that is possible. How many months of working with it would it take for me to get used to not having the things I use - and only the things I use - available to me? Perhaps never?

I might end up finding it easier to create a graph, but I don't do that every day. And I would never dispute that Excel's graphing capabilities have always been very unimpressive. Why not just improve things that need obvious fixing?

I seriously expect I would never actually see a productivity gain, after spending weeks or months getting used to it. For that reason, until I can truly control the UI, I will not "upgrade".