Office 2010

[MrRobin]

I'm now using Office 2010, having upgraded from using 2007 for the last 3 ish years. There does not seem to be an awful lot of new functionality over 2007 (Excel sparklines are cool tho) but it's wayyy better than 2003. I would never go back.

Yes the ribbons take getting used to and it's a pain for a week but after a while you know where everything is and they are grouped together pretty logically. This is a good resource for mapping old menu commands to new ones:

Learn where menu and toolbar commands are in Office 2010 and related products - Outlook - Microsoft Office

[2BIT]

I'm now using Office 2010, having upgraded from using 2007 for the last 3 ish years. There does not seem to be an awful lot of new functionality over 2007 (Excel sparklines are cool tho) but it's wayyy better than 2003. I would never go back.

Yes the ribbons take getting used to and it's a pain for a week but after a while you know where everything is and they are grouped together pretty logically. This is a good resource for mapping old menu commands to new ones:

Learn where menu and toolbar commands are in Office 2010 and related products - Outlook - Microsoft Office

fair enough but I don't know what new functionality 2007 brings in so don't know why it is so much better than 2003, what things in 2007 could you not give up?

[Spacecadet]

fair enough but I don't know what new functionality 2007 brings in so don't know why it is so much better than 2003, what things in 2007 could you not give up?

more than 64k rows
splitting delimited data into columns
the ribbon

actually loading CSV data into Excel 2007 is pretty good, it even seems to work out when a comma has been used in a field which hasn't been quoted

[2BIT]

more than 64k rows
splitting delimited data into columns
the ribbon

useful if you need to manipulate that much data, I would always use a DB for those volumes anyway

you can split CSV's across columns in 2003 (and most previous versions) - that said the save mechanism is clunky as it forces you to click through three messages just to save the file, but getting data in from a csv is a piece of piss in 2003

ribbon - hmm well I'm sure it is better when you get used to just have no impetus to change as I can't see the benefits (could be because I'm quite familiar with excel;s menus - the ribbon could come into its own in office products I'm less familiar with but I can't any intrinsic value in the ribbon and until XP/Office is gone I have no incentive to change - but perhaps there are benefits I'm unaware of

[Spacecadet]

useful if you need to manipulate that much data, I would always use a DB for those volumes anyway

Even though I've used SQL for 10 years being able to dump a lot of data into a spreadsheet and quickly apply sorts, filters, formatting, conditional formatting, lookups, charts, macros, pivoting and anything else you can think of makes using Excel for profiling data a lot easier than SQL.

[2BIT]

Even though I've used SQL for 10 years being able to dump a lot of data into a spreadsheet and quickly apply sorts, filters, formatting, conditional formatting, lookups, charts, macros, pivoting and anything else you can think of makes using Excel for profiling data a lot easier than SQL.

oh don't get me wrong excel is the go-to tool for quick and dirty data manipulation it's just that if I ever had to process that volume I'd use a DB -when I first started working I was doing very silly things with excel spreadsheets due to data volumes and the 65K limit but I didn't know any better - i've seriously never needed to put that amount of data into excel since (and have handled far higher volumes)

i think wordstar or word perfect released a spreadsheet that could handle up to 1M rows back in the day - but I tried it and it crashed straight away

so far the increased record count is a definite benefit but not enough to make me upgrade as I'll never use it - could be a game changer for many a user though

[TykeMerc]

What screen res have you got?

1920x1200 on this laptop, lots less on others.

The start menu takes up a full 1/3rd of the width of my netbook display.

Thing is it doesn't need to be anything like as wide and the ribbon could be a lot narrower too, I just wish I had the option to resize or use the old ones which were vastly neater.

[MrRobin]

I agree with some of the critic's comments about space saving... There does seem to be a theme of larger than necessary gaps between buttons / rows of text in menus, particularly in Outlook, I have found. I know you can change the font size but there doesn't seem to be any way to change the width of sub-window borders and gaps between email messages etc etc. Petty I know but I prefer to use the smaller form factor laptops which have smaller res screens.

Features that I love in excel 2007/2010 that make me hope to never go back to 2003 (and that everyone else ditches 2003) include:

Better colour palette
Better charting layouts (at last, someone at MS read Tufte)
Integration with sharepoint
Easier imports of external datasources
Much better formulas including easier error handling
Multithreaded calculations
Better conditional formatting options


I don't really care too much about the 65k row thing, I very rarely breach it... SQL is much more powerful to manipulate info

[2BIT]

Multithreaded calculations

that's the kind of stuff that I would probably trade for a familiar and logically designed menu system

does this include data retrieval? receiving data is often the bottleneck in excel so that would be a real incentive if the overall speed of receiving and refreshing data had been improved

have you compared the speed of the same spreadsheet between versions? if so was it noticeably different? excel is one of the only MS products I actually like and I think this would be the biggest improvement

[d000hg]

which to me is what has happened at microsoft, there was no wow factor to win7 (or xp for that matter) - but i'm not convinced the ribbon was driven by user desire any more than Bob or the search dog was...

Coming from XP, I'd say 7 is a BIG step. I notice when I switch between XP/Vista/7 machines for a start, unlike 2000 Vs 9x.

1920x1200 on this laptop, lots less on others.

The start menu takes up a full 1/3rd of the width of my netbook display.

I'm having a hard time visualising that... oh hang on do you mean the start bar that holds your open apps, or the menu when you click on Start? That's fairly big but why is that a problem? You can't keep it open and click on another window anyway so why shouldn't it take up 100% of the desktop if it makes finding things easier?
I do like the XP-style menu but I never thought the new one was getting in my way.