Microsoft Word 2007

Pros: Pretty to look at

Cons: Infuriating Ribbon interface

Summary: I have been a computer user for 26 years, and have used MSOffice for over 12 years. While Office was not always visually attractive or perfectly easy to use, it was always great at getting the job done. In OfficeXP and Office 2003, Microsoft greatly improved functionality and ease-of-use, and Office's tools became pretty easily accessible to both novices and power users.

And that's why I'm so angry about Office 2007's "Ribbon" upgrade. I am an expert computer user, and I am constantly frustrated by the difficulty of making the "easy" interface show me the tools I want. I also like using the keyboard to access menus and tools rather than the mouse, and the Ribbon makes this impossible. Worst of all, there's no View option that allows the legacy interface to be used--everyone is stuck with the Ribbon. Even when WinXP had its new interface, an option was provided for "Windows Classic" interfaces--no such flexibility in Office 2007.

I am having this much difficulty and I am, in all modesty, an expert. My mother-in-law and other non-experts have found Office 2007 to be completely useless. A teacher of one of her graduate classes handed out an assignment using Excel for statistics, and was shocked to learn that her instructions could not be followed at all in Office 2007--the functionalty for correlation and Data Analysis wasn't even installed by default! Even more telling, my organization recently decided not to upgrade to 2007, because the IT staff felt that most people wouldn't be able to re-learn how to use Word 2007 soon enough to offset the loss in productivty from dealing with the new interface.

I'm sticking with my old copy of OfficeXP, thanks. I truly hope that Microsoft makes a patch allowing Word 2007 to use the old interface.