Review by James

I’ve been using Office heavily since the 1995 version and always considered it one of the best products MS has ever produced. Starting in 2007 they introduced that horrid Ribbon interface which completely replaced the traditional and intuitive drop-down menus with a confusing jumble of icons spread amongst different tabs. Almost immediately the user base was divided between people who like the ribbon, and people like myself who can’t stand it. In the years since I’ve been forced to use Office 2007 and 2010 at work, I’ve gotten used to the ribbon to some extent but I still hate it. In addition to that, newer versions of Office introduced a new .docx file format which Office 2003 does not support. This change strikes me as a blatant attempt to force users to upgrade in order to share documents with users of Office 2010.

Office was a victim of its own success. Office 2003 is superb, it does everything I need it to do and more, and it does it well. Office 2007 and 2010 take the same basic functionality and change the user interface and file format for the sake of change. So long as Microsoft continues along this path, I will stick with Office 2003 at home.