Well, Tom lasted almost 24 hours before his guts got ripped out and replaced with bigger (500GB hdd!) and faster (2gb ram!) insides. (Still only an Atom processor though, can't wait to get a decent-speed, real-sized laptop that won't take ages to do anything, when I get back to Iceland!) Luce took ages learning how to use 'migrate' and 'grow' and 'shrink' tools in a usb-key-bootable version of linux called 'damn small linux' or something, aka 'knoppix', so I could install stuff on tom (160gb hdd) and not have to reinstall it when my computer became jason. But it didn't work. So I've spent days researching, buying, installing, reinstalling and coming to terms with MS Office 2007 (in particular Word, Excel, Access and some Powerpoint).
[Start Review of Office 2007, after 5 days intense usage]:
There are some things about Office 2007 that seem really good - the fact there's no title bar taking up screen real estate is a bonus when you have a 10" screen, and that the 'quick access' buttons can be moved above the menu bar. Both of these are 'half-size', so you only lose the space of the old title bar, no more (the title gets squished along to the right). You also lose the screen-space taken up by the half-line-sized status bar at the bottom, but it seems useful enough so I'm not complaining (about that) just yet. Thank Christ the ribbon can be minimised!
What I don't like about Office 2007 is that the Quick Access Buttons bar can't be undocked (that I can find), so I can't put it on the screen where it will be closest to my mouse for a couple of repetitive actions (that aren't worth recording a macro for). On the other hand, the styles pane doesn't seem to dock at all, which means that it covers up part of my page. To see all of my text, I have to zoom out, and this leaves a blank, unused area on the opposite side of the page to the style pane. This is pretty annoying, I hope they change this back to how it was in Office 2003.
The rulers are easy to turn on and off with a button at the top of the vertical scroll bar, just under the split screen button, so it takes up no room at all, and gives more room to my page. Again, good-o.
The hardest thing at the moment is working out where things I've used menu commands for for ages now (open styles pane, insert comment, insert (first) caption in document, insert header/footer, change AutoCorrect options, change preferences/tools-options, macro stuff), are, since they are no longer where they were. I think at least some of these have been moved to more logical places, eg the styles pane is opened by selecting the style button, and scrolling down to the 'More...' selection. That took a long time and some lateral thinking to find!
Finally, since I tend to have 3 or 4 Office programs opened at the same time, I'd like to be able to change the background colour of each independently. But when you go to 'Change Access options' and select 'black', it actually changes this in all of the Office programs. *sigh* Hopefully this can be changed soon too.
Woops, sorry for that launch into a review! But this is a blog, and this is part of my Icelandic adventure, even if it happened in Melbourne.
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2 comments:
what shit me about using the latest word was that it didn't seem to be any more user friendly (ok, nicer icons) they'd just hidden everything away and stolen the men structure. So for things where I used to know exactly which two mouse clicks (or how to use alt key to navigate menu quickly) to find the thing I wanted they made it so I had to make at least 5 mouse clicks.
only useful for people who like pretty icons and never learnt to use the old word.
yeah, I agree. But I'm going to give it a go, and not just so 'oh but it's DIFFERENT!' We'll see...
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