The Trials and Tribulations of a Word 2007 User
My name is Damien Fitzpatrick and I'm a Microsoft Word 2007 user.
There, I said it, I use Word 2007. In fact I've been using it since its release and being somewhat experienced in the whole WYSIWYG editor space I thought that I would share a few of my favourite features and a few of those that I could live without. I use Word day in and day out. It's something that I use for work and something that I use even more for my university assignments so I'm pretty familiar with the product - or at least I think I am. That said, I've never been one to heavily customize the interface and I've certainly never written a Word macro.
Before I get underway though, credit where credit's due, congratulations to the Microsoft Office development team. It's been a long time between Office releases and they've really made some progress in this release as well as trying to freshen up one of the most enduring product families in software. They've made some bold moves with this release (say hello to the ribbon bar) and I think some of them have paid off while the jury is out on some others.
What I Like
Let's start out on a positive note. As part of working through my MBA I often have to produce professional looking reports as part of a case study or some other exercise. Unfortunately my documents just don't look fancy or that professional - they just look like another Word document. At least that was the situation until Word 2007 got installed on my PC. The Word team is to be congratulated on their ability to format plain text and make it look great. I particularly like the new functionality around the styles for a document. I can now easily choose a set of styles to make my document look distinctive, modern, fancy or formal (just some of the style sets available). I also like the changes to the header and footer functionality and the ease with which I can create a great looking cover page from a template kindly provided by Word.
The jewel in the crown of the styles functionality for me has to be the textbox functionality. Wow, textboxes look great and they're just text. I know I could have done some of this in Word 2003, but the textboxes in 2007 and so much better. I can now quickly and easily create textboxes to highlight phrases and to make page borders in a great variety of new ways. It shows that just because something is in plain text doesn't mean it has to be boring.
As a student submitting referenced assignments I'm also a big fan of the new functionality for citations and bibliographies. They make it much easier for me to put referencing in my document which is great since creating reference lists has to be one of the most painful tasks I go through as part of writing an assignment.
What I Don't Like
By now you've probably noticed that I am yet to write anything about the new ribbon toolbar - well as you might have guessed, it's because I don't like it. It's because I can't FIND anything (don't get me started on how long it took me to find the zoom scroll bar). Granted, there's going to be time taken in learning any new user interface and it did take me time to find things on the old menus, but over the years the menus and I had come to a grudging respect, well mostly I learnt to respect them and not the other way around. Maybe I will get used to the new ribbon over time, but part of me thinks that that's hardly the point, I thought we were all told it was supposed to be more intuitive? Yes, the ribbon bar was supposed to be more intuitive, yes it was supposed to be more usable and it is, up to a point. In case you're interested, for me, that point is up to anything that's on the Home tab, beyond that I'm lost - incidentally the Home tab is made up of all those things that already was on the toolbars of Word.
So you are probably wondering now whether I'm just one of those stubborn users adverse to change even if it's for my own good. Obviously I'd like to think that I'm not so I did some introspection to try and work out why I can't find anything. As you might have guessed I've come up with a few points:
- To me the options on the ribbon just aren't ordered well by default. Yes, I could re-order them and I probably will at some stage, but right now I really wanted to use Word how it's creators intended and given how long it took me to find where to customize the ribbon I'm not sure they intended it to be customized. To date every time I've used Word 2007 I've had to go searching through the ribbons at least once and it's not because they aren't intuitive it's because my intuition obviously expects a command to be in a different place to the Microsoft UI designer's intuition. For instance, why isn't the Headers and Footer functionality on the Page Layout tab where I expected it to be and where did my spell check and print buttons go?
- Secondly, I have an issue with modes. As a Mac user and someone familiar with the works of Jef Raskin, Adrian, has always warned me of the dangers of modes within user interfaces. Of course I had always laughed this off as someone who can operate a VCR's recording schedule mode is entitled to do. However, it's come back to bite me. Adrian you were right, modes are bad. I've found a great article explaining my conundrum, and yes, it's from Adrian. He was well ahead of me on this issue, his article on Modes and the Office 12 [2007] UI is spot on. I'm wondering how many other people are having this problem? The most significant problem I have with modes is that I seamlessly switch between them (at least in my head). I might be reviewing a document one moment and then wanting to add a table or paragraph to it the next and now that means all those other functions are yet another click away from me because I have to switch tabs.
The Verdict
There's a whole lot more to Word 2007 including a new file format, integration with Sharepoint and that's just for starters. However, the things I've mentioned briefly above are the features that matter to me when I'm using Word. I'd have to say that for me Microsoft Word 2007 is mostly a winner. I'm prepared to learn the new ribbon user interface for the benefits that I get from the new styles functionality. However, I think it's going to be tough for many rolling out this huge user interface change across an entire business. The user interface is the foundation upon which business productivity is built and since Microsoft Office is all about delivering productivity gains let's hope that I'm wrong and that the ribbon is going to make us all more productive.
UPDATE: Sample Document
Jason asked me for a sample document, so here's one. Sorry I didn't have anything more exciting than this, but this document uses a cover page automatically generated by Word 2007 and themed headers, footers and headings to match.
July 29th, 2007 at 7:24 am
Hey, have you got any pictures of fancy looking word docs. I use word 2003 to write guitar lessons but want to improve the layout.
August 5th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Hi Jason,
I’ve added a sample document to the article. Unfortunately, it’s fairly plain, but hopefully it will give you some idea. For what I do at least - which is writing reports and assignments - Word 2007 has certainly helped me create better presentation and layout much more easily.
Damien
June 21st, 2008 at 1:31 am
There’s one thing I like in Word 2007 … the slide bar to adjust the document view-zoom. I’ll use that a lot. Even if it is stuck clear at the bottom right, about as far as it can get from any other functional items.
If you find a way to ‘reorder’ the ribbons, please share it!! I spent my first 3 hours on Word trying to do just that, because each tab contains 75% things I never use. If I can’t delete items I don’t need, I’d at least like to sort them so the ones I want aren’t mixed up in the mess. The only option I’ve found so far is a $30 add-on program. (Appears that the ribbons are rather like the sidebar in Outlook … Microsoft has decided what I’ll use and how I’ll use it … whether it’s what I actually need or not.) I finally resorted to minimizing the whole ribbon mess and customizing the quick toolbar to include the things I use most. I’m happy to be back to one-click editing and formatting, instead of 2007’s three-clicks-and-then-search technique. (Not to be put off, however, whenever I highlight anything to edit, Word cleverly pops up a little window with the tab/ ribbon it thinks I need … 4 out of 5 times so far: wrong choice!). There are probably ways to customize things more, but if so, they’re as cleverly hidden as the double-underline function!
As someone who’s typed and word-processed for a living for over 40 years, this version hasn’t shown me anything special, and a whole lot that doesn’t work. Microsoft has a dynamite marketing team, to make this stuff industry standard; I wish the functionality of their software was half as good.