I don't like Office 2007.
"Ooh, it's fresh and original. It's a revolution in UI design." Blah blah blah. I've used Office 2007 for a week now, and I don't like it.
First off, I can't find anything. I've been an Office power user for 15 years now, but with '07 I don't know where any of the commands are. It's not intuitive at all. There's no edit menu. I find myself constantly using the help manual. It's slowing me down.
Second, it's a step down in functionality. With every prior version, I was able to customize the interface to my liking. Toolbars on the top, toolbars on the bottom, floating color pallets, whatever I wanted. You can't do that any more. The only thing you can customize is a tiny row of buttons crammed into the title bar. It's the classic egotistical "we know what you want better than you do" that I've come to expect from Microsoft. But as computer users get more experienced and more savvy, Microsoft dumbs it down.
Finally, the interface is a nightmare. The ribbon isn't even uniform across all programs; in Outlook you get the old fashioned menu bar until you open a new window (say, to write an email)--then all of a sudden the menu bar disappears and you get a ribbon instead. But my biggest complaint is the windows themselves. There are two ways of handling windows: "multiple document interface" (MDI) or "single document interface" (SDI). MDI is when you have all the windows within one "parent" window, like in Adobe Photoshop. In Photoshop this is arguably a useful feature because you have so many palettes floating around, it's nice to have one parent window to keep them all in line. (Although, the Mac version of Photoshop doesn't use an MDI and it manages just fine.) SDI is when each window is its own window. You have two open documents? Put them wherever you want. Move, minimize, put on different monitors, etc.
So what does Office 2007 do? Both, and neither. Word 2007 and Outlook 2007 are SDI. Excel 2007 is MDI. In Office 2003 you could choose which interface you wanted. In Office 2007, you can't.
Of course, I've found a way to overcome Microsoft's ham-handed attempts to tell me how to work. If you're using Excel 2007 and you really want separate windows for separate documents, here's how you do it:
Yes, in Excel, when you click new, it does do the multiple Taskbar Buttons trick that swaps out the active document in the main window. Doing so triggers the exact same functionality as if you selected a different "Book" (or MDI child window, essentially) from the Window menu. Yes, you get the MDI feel. This is shown by your Workbooks showing up in the "Window" list. Yes, this results in it being tricky to run adjacent windows on a single or even multiple monitors. This is the problem you're describing.
What you're trying to accomplish, to achieve true SDI, can absolutely be done. All you have to do is load up another *instance* of Excel. That is, Start-->Run-->[Excel, Winword, Powernt]. With this new instance, you have another MDI container which, if only one document is open, functions essentially as SDI. Now you have TWO movable windows / SDI interfaces, TWO taskbar buttons, and the capacity to place these windows you want over multiple monitors. Each instance then maintains a distinct list of child documents.
Credit goes to a comment I found on a Microsoft programmer's blog, here. Of course, the solution itself doesn't come from Microsoft, not even from a Microsoft employee, but from some third-party user who had to leave it on someone else's blog. And, of course, this is a terrible solution; it's inelegant and drains system resources (but this is Microsoft so that's not surprising).
My objections with Office 2007 are not because of cosmetic changes or unfamiliarity. It is a true step downward in functionality. Meanwhile the open source office suites are gaining ground--not only OpenOffice.org, but now Google Docs, as well as new office suites from IBM and KDE. Just like with Vista, Office 2007 shows that Microsoft is losing their edge. I think we're entering a new era of competition, both for operating systems and for office suites, and when there's competition, you know who wins: the consumers.
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