Office 2007....?

So whats up with Office 2007..?

I have been using it for a year now and my productivity has slowly crept back up to perhaps 60% of what it was with Office 2003.

This is a catastrophic release of any new product. The decision to redesign the interface was almost on a par with the astonishing error of releasing Vista...two zingers in a year...way to go Mr Softee.

I am no longer ranting about this but I have spread the word to as many people as I can: IT folks at big corporations, KM folks in big law firms, friends, family and neighbors.

Why? Because I am hopeful that if enough people simply refuse to upgrade and wait for the next release instead, the next release will restore some semblance of the old interface so we can all get back to work

While Redmond may like to tell us they have boosted productivity with this smart looking redesign, they are all wrong all the way. The whiz kids who did the usability research forgot the simple fact that Word is now a Legacy product (capital "L") and so all changes MUST be retroactively compatible.

There are over 100 million people out there using MS Word daily. Most of us learned it the hard way when we were forced to migrate from Wordperfect etc. We mastered the Word clunky interface and found all the useful but buried commands, eventually learning how to get to them with closed eyes and great speed.

Now in 2007, none of that works anymore.

Simple tasks can take agonizing minutes of searching. You can be trained all over again but the speed is lost....may never come back.

I might just switch to something else altogether.