Review by Harkius

I’ll confess. I was enraged when Microsoft brought out the 2007 version of their flagship Office Efficiency Package, and the files were not easily backwards compatible (I mean, you CAN save things as Office 2003 format, but who wants to go to the effort of setting it as the default??)nnThat said, I eventually came to terms with the fact that this is, after all, Microsoft Office, and you don’t really have much of a say in what it does or how it does it. Microsoft will make it the way that they think that you want it, and you…will live with it. It’s Microsoft’s world, we just use the applications in it. Shrug.

Eventually, though, I decided to suck it up and start to learn 2007 (and 2010, which seems pretty much the same, with a few differences that I will note below). My major problem with 2010 is the user interface at the top of the screen. While meant to be more intuitive for newer users (or people who lack technical skills or spend too much time on MySpace and Facebook), it hides the options that I used to know in places where I don’t know to look. :( This creates a lot of frustration and wasted time for me.

Differences from 2007:n1) You can natively create PDFs. This was huge for me, because I like to make unalterable documents for sending to people. Native support for this is nice, even if it should just be something that you expect.

2) Cloud support. You can save items directly to your SkyDrive. Nice.

3) You can show powerpoint presentations over the internet, and your viewers only need a browser (whether this needs to be InternetExplorer, I don’t know yet.)nnSo, if those things, along with a bevy of other features that I don’t personally use, but are apparently available (Embedding web videos into presentations, Macros for Outlook, an altered Print functionality (which I actually hate), video editing tools in Power Point, built in screen capture tools, the ability to make a video of your power point slides, and some garbage about making Outlook interact with your social networking sites) make this sound worthwhile, then by all means, pick it up.

I expect that they have also removed a large number of security problems (and made a series of new ones while they were at it) as well.

So, for all intents and purposes, it is Microsoft Office. You already know if you hate it. But you have to live with it, and I think that this one is better than 2007, if not as good as 2003.

Harkius