200,000 downloads of Office in 24 hours

I loving the ribbons.

Might this be why the general-public availability (not MSDN) of Vista B2 will only be available in the "coming weeks"? Did they need to space them quite that far apart? Any word on a more specific time?

I won't be downloading the Office Beta or upgrading to Vista anytime soon.

I hate Office 2007 - I used that beta about 2-3 weeks ago and I could find any of my shortcuts I've been using for 10 years - not in excel, not in word. This is going to put a serious dent in my productivity and I suspect, in the productivity across heavy, high end users segment worldwide - lawyers, academics and finance people who pay good money for the seats they consume.

I suspect that the 200,000 people who downloaded it are going to pretty much feel the same way as I do. If it's just a question of money or time, could you suggest to the development team that they fix it before the release date? Because this is a serious issue on the UI/navigation front that will affect adoption - it's the app equivalent of 5% differential in design between apple's iPod and the rest that drives usability.

It's pretty much getting to the point where I'm starting to think that the way forwward might be to start doing my word processing with an XSL-FO editor. At the very least, it's stable. And W3C compliant browser (not IE 7) will be able to read it.

Due to the abysmal failure of Office 2003 sales (last official figures pointed that only 20 to 25% of users have upgraded, primarily because there is no reason to), Microsoft had to make a big change in the front.

They could have changed the splashscreen and the color of icons, but perhaps that would have been somewhat too insulting.

So they decided to change the UI. The UI is not more or less productive. It's different. For instance, the fact that the ribbon changes depending on what you click means that the eye needs to consistantly adjust to those changes, instead of just doing work. That is a departure from earlier versions. I simply don't know whether that's good or not in the long run.

On the downside, the ribbon has all icons and pictures all put together in a scrambled kind of way. Just look at the screenshots, the ribbon underlying structure makes zero sense. Whoever designed this should be fired immediately.

I suspect Office 2007 home to be given free with Vista home, only to boost Vista sales, and bootstrap the Office 2007 install base.

In beta 2 the keyshortcuts are all the same as they have always been.

e.g. alt - aib inserts a new row in a table

Haven't you guys heard of torrents? Good lord that's a heavy load to put on a pipe when you don't need to!

I haven’t downloaded or taken it for a test drive yet but a few points that would make any software better that I have yet to see implemented.

Finding what you need has always been hard, people know where the features are that they use regularly because they have to, not because there is always logic behind it. I have been convinced for years software companies hide features to sell support: books, classes, cds, magazines, and diplomas. It’s backwards thinking that ends up with unhappy customers. It used to fly because companies were willing to train people to save money long term, but the justification is much harder or damn near impossible to make anymore.

My other big complaint seems a bit strange but makes sense. Software sometimes needs to not just tell you what it can do but what it can’t do. And no I don’t expect to type into help, “How do I make coffee with Excel” and get a response, but there has been a time when most of us have spent far too much time trying to find out how to do something that can’t be done. You started with help, moved on to the online help, then you prayed to the google gods and hoped someone out there had the same need and posted about it. Then you called a friend who knows something about computers.

Word does a lot has lots of features, many that most people will ever know or need; but because of this people have no real idea what it can do or for that matter what it can’t.

People just need to know if they can accomplish what they need to do with this program and how.
The faster the better.

I downloaded Office 2007 and used it for less than an hour. It became immediately apparent that unless I remembered the keystroke commands from Office 2000, I wouldn't be able to find the commands I wanted under the new ribbon menu. I started to panic when I realized that this was not going to be a productivity boost but rather a waste of time for me and my office staff. The last straw was when I found out that the installation had disabled PhotoDraw, which was part of Office 2000 but is not part of Office 2007.

I didn't waste any time uninstalling Office 2007 and reinstalling Office 2000. 2000 is satisfactory for our needs, and I don't need the pretty blue screen and inscrutible commands. Thanks for scaring the bee-jeepers out of me and teaching me a well-deserved lesson, Microsoft!

--GizmoLaw