Have any of you switched over to Microsoft Word 2007 yet? My workplace is just making the switchover now, and I must say I am highly annoyed with that. Actually, I’m not annoyed with my company, but with Microsoft (MS). They have decided to cater to the lowest common denominator of Word users, and make the interface more “user friendly” (and I use that term extremely, extremely loosely here.) As a power user of Word, I’ve gotten used to being able to do my word processing tasks a certain way, or at least know where to hunt for things if I didn’t know where it was. But now, with this so-called “improvement”, MS has made the UI so incomprehensible that the learning curve for power users has gone up to an insane amount. I mean, I’m used to a period of adjustment when upgrading, but this is just insane. Why is it that MS decides to cater to the beginner to intermediate user and seemingly are now ignoring the power user? Is it just me that thinks this new change affects power users this way? Perhaps I’m just being oversensitive, however right now I’d like to know who their UI and usability team was, and ask them the classic “WTF?” because I find this switch really unnerving.
They’ve moved previously grouped items like page breaks and section breaks to different “views” (their version of a tab there at the top of the window). They’ve changed the name of the Normal view to Online (or was it something else? I forget, it’s just such an unobvious change that I can’t seem to remember the new one.) They’ve buried the Style Editor into this teeny, tiny, insignificant little box/arrow thingy that it took me and another TW with over 15 years experience 15 minutes to find it!
Is anyone else having difficulty with Word 2007? Is it really more user friendly? Have they actually made anything easier to do for the power user? I have only been using it for less than a week, so I can’t speak to that, however I’ve seen it over the months since it’s release and was shuddering at the thought of having to use it, however here I am. Let me hear your thoughts dear readers, because I find this to be an extremely frustrating experience.
1 response so far ↓
ffeathers // March 1, 2008 at 3:21 am
Hi there
I haven’t really got into Office 2007 yet. I am a power user of Office 2003, and I now have 2007 on my machine at home. But I’ve only tried it out a few times, and always when I’m in a hurry and just need to get the job done.
And I completely share your frustration! I cannot find anything I need. Everything is just too full of the “Hi-there-how-are-you-doing” sort of popups and the “find-me-if-you-can” dropdowns. I think we should dub it O07, licence to kill
Perhaps a lesson lurks somewhere, for us tech writers: If we are documenting a product which undergoes a major UI change, we should work hard on telling our users what’s changed and where it’s gone to.