Views on Office 2007

[GrimR]

Does Office 2007 have any known bugs.
Does it interfere with firewalls or VPN or wireless settings.
Is the only issue the .docx or are there others.
I have a partner who knows a little about IT that went to the UK and the IT people there told him that Office 2007 is an unstable platform and will cause all the problems listed above.

 

[TonyJollans]

1. It really depends on how one defines 'bug', given that the product isn't really documented. I guess most people would answer "yes".
2. Not as far as I know. Why would it?
3. What do you mean by ".docx" being an issue?
4. I'm in the UK but I don't know what relevance it has to your questions.
5. Define "unstable". Yes, it falls over sometimes, but its recovery is improved over earlier versions.

As with most people, I like some aspects of the product and dislike others. I have my own views about how some aspects of it work, or sometimes don't. If you want to use particular features, investigate - or ask about - those. This kind of vague generality is essentially meaningless and equivaent statements could be made, or equivalent questions asked, about most any product.


Enjoy,
Tony

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[GrimR]

Thanks for you views Tony.

2. Not as far as I know. Why would it? =
I agree
3. What do you mean by ".docx" being an issue =
Our software embeds Word and Excel docs so if you open these with 2003 converstion needs to take place. This causes some issues in the software.
4. I'm in the UK but I don't know what relevance it has to your questions. =
None I was merely saying that the IT staff at the conference, where highly against 2007. Basically saying that the connectivity issues where caused by 2007. Which brings us back to No.2, this should have nothing to do with it.
BTW it's a partner here arguing with me. Obviously me as the IT administrator for 10 yrs running EXch 2007, Sql, Linux, 98, 2000, XP, Vista all versions of Office have no idea what I'm talking about.
5. Define "unstable". Yes, it falls over sometimes, but its recovery is improved over earlier versions. =
I must say this has only happened to me once out of 40 installs and running it for over 2yrs.

 

[MakeItSo]

Re unstable:
I was using 2007 for a period of ~3 months. During this time, Word has crashed in the average once every other day. All I did was type. No fancy styles, tables, columns, bookmarks, references or anything of that sort. Just a few headings of one style, no numbering, one body style, and page breaks before every chapter.

Of course, my translation tool add-in would not work very well with 2007 either (slow as a snail, with only half the functionality).

The Word Help too was a joke - search function did not work and so forth.
In short: I hated it. It was a giant waste of a helluvalotuv money!
I won't let Office 2007 get any closer to me than 50 feet unless I am forced to it with under the threat of weapon use!


[navy]"We had to turn off that service to comply with the CDA Bill."[/navy]
- The Bastard Operator From Hell

 

[GlennUK]

Re: "unstable" and "bugs"

We have been using Excel 2007 for a few months, and it crashes regularly, but most of the time is recovers documents correctly. Note that I said "most" of the time ... every so often you lose your data. It seems to be more unstable when Sharing documents.

As for bugs, we are finding them every so often, but this is to be expected with any new version ... and this version is a big step with major functionality changes, probably encompassing massive rewrites and new code within the product. It sounds like I'm defending Micro$oft, but I'm not, I had expected bugs, and wasn't surprised when they started showing up, is all I'm saying.

Cheers, Glenn.

Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.

 

[GrimR]

Thanks for the replies so far. I have run mine 2yrs no crash. But I do hate the menus, but love outlook automated setup.
BTW have you all loaded SP1?

 

[GlennUK]

So you've run yours 2yrs and no crash? Which parts of Office have you been using ... is Excel one of them? Our initial upgrade here was to a limited number of users ( about 20 ), for a specific project, all installed with SP1, and the crashes started to happen almost straight away.

Cheers, Glenn.

Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.

 

[GrimR]

Glenn I use Outlook every day all day. Word now and again. I even managed to import Macros from 2003 to 2007, for our one secretary with no side effects.
Excel once a month for invoicing. Only had font issues here, but that's now sorted.
And with 40+ installed on the network I have had no complaints yet. Only Vista

 

[GlennUK]

Excel once a month for invoicing? That's not exactly taxing Excel all that much by the sound of it. As soon as we started doing any volume of data manipulation we got crashes ( I'm talking about a few thousand rows, with a couple of hundred columns ).

Cheers, Glenn.

Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.

 

[Lilliabeth]

We have been using it since it came out. We have had no problems at all and we all like it fine. We all cussed at first because it was hard to find tools, but we learned.

We use Access, Excel, Outlook, Word and Publisher. I don't think anyone here uses PowerPoint or Project much.



--Lilliabeth

 

[GrimR]

Glenn I may not use it much being the IT person but I do support the 40+ who use it daily, and fairly large spreadsheets, including templates and macros.

 

[GlennUK]

Ah, your users use Excel entensively, and so does Lilliabeths lot too by the sound of it. I guess we were just doing things that happened to crash Excel then.

It sounds as though it's quite stable for you and others.

Cheers, Glenn.

Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.

 

[TonyJollans]

It clearly does depend what use one makes of the different apps. There are new components (Excel charting engine for example) that don't work as well as one might wish. The various issues do tend to affect developers and power users, who are the people most vocal in their complaints. Most average users seem happy with it.

I dislike the ribbon and still can't find things on it. I make extensive use of the keyboard instead - it's so much quicker than hunting down ribbon commands. But, whether we like it or not, it looks like it is probably here to stay, and I've not heard of any real technical problems with it.

There are many complaints about the new file format, such as "it's not proper xml" and "it's not really open", many of them probably valid, but it is more resilient than the old binary formats. As far as conversion goes, what you say is a bit of a red herring. When opeing a file - embedded or not - the format on disk has to be converted to an internal format, whether it was 97-2003 format or 2007 format; it just needs different code to do that conversion.

I'm afraid connectivity problems escape me - I don't know what they coud be or what might cause them.

Enjoy,
Tony

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[GrimR]

Thanks all for your feedback. What I can see is summed up by Tony in the way that I view 2007. Even though there are issues in some environments there is no evidence that this should effect connectivity.