A Review of Office 2007

It has been fashionable, for some time, to hate Microsoft. If anything, though, I have tended to be an apologist for the folks from Redmond.

Notwithstanding the complaints of those who use other proprietary or open-source programmes, the fact remains that Microsoft's products, and especially its Office Suite, have always worked quite well. Perhaps more importantly, they have been compatible with the software being used by most, if not all, of my clients. For these reasons, I have never been a Microsoft "hater".

While I'm not in love with Microsoft, I acknowledge that, in business, it is less important to have the "best" software than it is to have software that can freely and reliably exchange information with the people that you have to communicate with on a daily basis, and this has usually been the case with the Office suite.

It is in this same regard, however, that Microsoft has dropped the ball with Office 2007. Most of my complaints have to do with backward compatibility.

Outlook 2007 is not very different than its predecessors, except that it can be difficult to actually send someone an email, unless they also have the updated product.

Sending photographs is particularly difficult, because of different protocols used by the new software. I recently spent far too much time using Outlook 2007 to try to send photographs to a client, whose corporate email simply couldn't open the attachments. Having tried a number of work-arounds, I finally printed the picture, put it in an envelope and mailed it to him.

This won't be a problem, once everyone has upgraded, but large corporations are loathe to update their office suites (and retrain all of their employees) simply because Microsoft has issued a new version. It's expensive and time consuming, and seen to be of little value when the "old" software is working well and the "new" software offers little in the way of improvements for the end-user.

Similarly, Word and Excel save your documents in a "new" file format, which will be unreadable by the recipient unless they have downloaded the appropriate reader (unlikely in a corporate environment) or you have manually converted the document to the "old" format before sending it. This method for handling backward compatibility is both time consuming and frustrating, especially if you share a lot of documents. True, you can choose to save in the "old" format as you create documents, but that brings into question the value of having a "new" format at all.

While there are probably technical considerations that are well beyond my comprehension, I can't understand why Microsoft didn't just provide a patch to incorporate the necessary readers into older versions of Office.

Disappointingly, the release of Office 2007 was to herald a brand new and much better system and, if you look under the hood, it may have been a success. But, aside from the complaints noted above, it did nothing to address my one long-standing complaint with the Office Suite, and that is the lack of interactivity between Outlook and the rest of the package.

Outlook 2007 is a pretty good database, but you still can't open a contact and click a button to write a letter to that contact using a template that you created in Outlook. To use the templates that you have defined, you still have to exit Outlook, start Word, load the template and then import the address for the contact.

Outlook could, and should, be the "dashboard" that users rely on to deal with contact, data and document management for all of their contacts. Microsoft might do well to dust off the files on the old "Binder" project and seek to create a time-saving and efficient method to bring all of the best components of the Office Suite together. And it should do it in a way that allows the small business owner to easily communicate with key contacts.

Office 2003 is now unsupported software but, for small or home business owners, I would not recommend paying for the costly upgrade until you have to. The value simply isn't there.