Don't Upgrade to Office 2007 (It's Windows ME)

I'm having a bad technical day.  Firstly my Telstra Bigpond Cable had been down for most of the day, with no Service Status update to at least let us know there's something wrong.  Hey maybe it's just me.  Give credit to Telstra, my Cable has been stable for over 4 years, and this is the first time I can remember that there's been a prolonged outage just like the good 'ol days.

And talking of good 'ol days, Office 2007 seems to have converted my stable XP system into Windows ME.  Yes, it's that bad!  Slow, hanging, locking.

Hey Microsoft, here's a clue.  Whatever you did to Windows XP to stop it being Windows ME, can you please do that for Office 2007.  I don't think it's a hardware resource thing.  I don't think I need more memory, a faster processor, or a bigger faster disk.  I think it's bad coding or testing.

But worst of all, what exactly am I getting for all this suffering?  I just can't see what extra, Office 2007 is giving me.  A few more commands out in the open, a floating command "ribbon", a change of colours, a few more colours added.  Maybe I haven't read the manual, or you Microsoft haven't marketed or even sold me on the new features.  What new features?  I just can't find them.

What you're saying Microsoft, is that you've taken Outlook and PowerPoint as far you can, and you can't even make it perform.  What the hell is Office 2007 doing that's slowing everything down?  Even my mouse cursor sometimes slows and sometimes disappears for a while!  It's Windows ME!!

Let's face it, most of us got hooked on Microsoft years ago, because we thought all the Office products would integrate well together and upgrade easily.  So far they still upgrade easily as long as you guess which ones to not go for too early.  The Office 2007 upgrade at least was easy and with no trouble, it's just what it's done to my laptop.  Vista Upgrade?  No Thanks.

Maybe, just maybe one or several of the few applications I use that integrate with Office, such as, Skylook, or MindManager, is causing this, but I don't think it is.  It's as if Office 2007 hasn't been coded properly, it's going off to look for something, can't find it, so it slows or hangs.  Even my RSS feedreader SharpReader, has been misbehaving since the upgrade.

If ever there was a time to look at Thunderbird, and find an alternative to PowerPoint, then this would be it.  Yes yes, even Apple or Linux, but I won't have the wool pulled over my eyes with either of those two.  If it's not better and I can't get the applications, then I'm stuck.  In fact, I'm was very happy with XP and Office 2003, I just hoped that an early Office 2007 would give me something to enhance my Presentations, and help me Get Things Done.

Not Yet!

Comments

[steve clayton]

Tony

Has it gotten any better after a day or so? one thing that can happen is the content indexing (aka search) in outlook can slow things down for a while. just wondering if that may be the source of the slowdown?

as for new features, powerpoint has some great ones. notably when you drop images in and double click - you get the formatting ribbon which has some nice touches that used to take me 30 mins in Photoshop. also if you have a bulleted list in powerpoint, try a right click and convert to smartart - may (or may not) be of use.

hope this helps

Steve

[Tony Goodson]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the comment.

It's not the content indexing, because I'm not using it!

I use Google Desktop, not because it's better, just that I started with Microsoft Desktop search but it didn't have an add-on for MindManager 6 mindmaps, Google did, so I switched to Google.

I was hoping to attract some Office 2007 tips, and now you're talking.

I've had more of a play with smartart, and that is looking very good. How do you make boring bullet points look more interesting. SmartArt seems just the thing. Or don't have bullet points!

And I've had more of a look at image editing, and there is a lot more there than I first thought.

So yes, your comment has helped. Where's the best place for simple Office 2007 (PowerPoint, Outlook, Word, Excel) tips?

[Mary]

I have heard of people having similar issues that were resolved after they disabled the RSS feed stuff...