Microsoft Office 2007

Last night, I was toying with the idea of upgrading to Office Professional 2007, so I went on to amazon.com to check it out. The first surprise I got was the cost of upgrading ($260US) and the cost of the full product ($386US). However, the one thing that really gave me a shock was the significant number of reviews that were 2 star and below. A whopping 58 percent of the 153 reviews were 2 stars or below!!! I got the feeling after reading about 40 reviews that Microsoft didn't exactly do the right thing making all of the changes in 2007 that one enjoys with the notorious "ribbon". I'm not here to bash Microsoft, but I do have some questions that the frequent users of this forum might be able to answer. My questions are as follows:

1) Do you think that the graphics engine in Excel 2007 is superior or inferior to the graphics engine in Excel 2003? Before answering, please note that Jon Peltier, a Microsoft MVP specializing in Excel graphs, has stated that he thinks the graphs in Excel 2003 are more precise and accurate than the graphs in Excel 2007.

2) Do I need to go out and spring for an Alienware Area-51 tricked out laptop and install Office 2007 Professional onto this monster machine so that I do not experience the numerous performance problems that the amazon users claim they're experiencing?

3) I have downloaded and am using version 3.0 of the openoffice.org productivity suite. The price of this software to me was $0.00US. If I were very serious about learning the macro language that now exists in OpenOffice Calc, and devoted 6 months of study attempting to learn the completely different java based (or is it Python?) macro language, would I be able to create the kind of OpenOffice Calc macros that I have taken for granted in Excel 2003 with its built in VBE?

4) How many of you feel that Microsoft will shift its Office features to equivalent online ("cloud computing") products in lieu of developing the next desktop suite (I believe it's Office 2009)? I know for a fact that Microsoft is pushing Share Point really hard because they see the handwriting on the wall with Google Docs. I believe Microsoft has the resources and creative talent to shift all of the functionality to thin client computing (or fully functional desktop/laptop computers with no office suites installed on their hard drives) which access web space on Share Point. The multiples for this kind of solution deployment versus deploying installable office suites to destops are much higher.

5) Have any of you made the switch to other types of office suites or gone back to Office 2003 because of the experiences related to using Office 2007?

Thank you,

Hi Bruce,

I have been a hardcore user of Excel forever, and switched to Office 2007, and I love it. My experience has been that, somewhat paradoxically, highly experienced Excel users were, at least initially, the most frustrated with Excel 2007, because everything is located in a different place. The more you know, the more you have to re-learn. Personally, I think the ribbon is great, and after a few days using it, I found the old interface awkward. Another point - unlike previous versions of Office, I found that Help was actually helpful...

To your specific questions:

1) No comments on the charts - I find Excel 2007 charts more pleasing to the eye in general, but don't know about "accuracy". If I need advanced charts, I would not use Excel anyways, but rather a scientific app.

2) Did not have specific performance issues. Most of the performance issues I got were related to Vista, through insufficient graphic power of my computer. However, I also have changed a bit my Excel development philosophy: I try to keep my workbooks lean and fast (and dumb, i.e. with as little logic as possible), and move as much heavy lifting as I can in VSTO/.NET. For that reason, I may have avoided some performance problems...

3) Interested in hearing what people have to say!

4) I am pretty sure MSFT will push hard to make Office usable on the cloud, and that is great. Sharing/Editing Excel files across multiple users has always been a pain, and this would be addressing that issue. However I would be really surprised if they did not invest efforts on upgrading the desktop application. They can't really afford to alienate the existing user base, especially power users. There are so many spreadsheets around that are crucial to businesses, full to the brim with automation and VBA and whatnot - and I don't think they will be able to replicate all that on the cloud, at least in the near future.

Bruce

Interesting question. I, with my MVP award have been using Excel 2007 it seems for ever. We were all very excited when we were given very early pre-beta releases back in November 2006, I think?

Excitement grew with the addition of the new file formats (if only for their size at first), conditional formatting, additional functions (although some we felt were still missing), pivot table upgrade, better data connection handling and all the extra colours.

The gloss faded a little, we us, as power users couldn't find too much and some 'holes' started to appear in the extra stuff that had been done. In particular charts, shapes, etc. This was mainly due as the charting, etc in Excel was lost from the exclusive domain of the Excel Dev's and passed over to the Office team and renamed 'Office Art'. This was supposed to be the move to WPF, etc, etc. Without doubt, this area was launched 'under-cooked', caused I think mainly by the delays and changes with Vista.

Make no mistake, the jobs taken on in this release of Excel were massive. Bigger than ever before with a huge increase in the team and the addition of a server version also, which has often gone un-noticed. Did they hit all the goals? Absolutely not, is it a bad release? Absolutely not. It IS a V1 of a new generation of V2 applications if you like. (I compare it to Excel 97, which was vastly improved at Excel 2000).

I have used it in my Excel writings and question answering on the web almost exclusively now for 18 months. Equally, my Company have used it exclusively for over a year. It is sometimes tough to go back.

Your specific questions:

1. Definitely slower currently, unless you ramp up your resources. It is a new vector graphics engine and the number of colours went up from 54 to 16k or something with shading, highlighting, etc. So, I would say they gave some and they took away some. I use charts only as a quick end-product to graphically represent data (rough and ready if you like), I think they look great and are far easier to customise the little nuances. Charting experts like Jon and Andy will be frustrated. Not least because they were so 'in tune' with the V.pre ways of doing things. I am sure, as this area is so crucial, MS will get this right over SPs and V.Next. Also, if you want to share graphics between MS apps. This is definitely improved and will continue to do so as it is now an Office product.
2. Performance problems have definitely been out there but I would contend these have been added to by vendors struggling to work with Vista. In particular virus scanner vendors. The load time is definitely longer. Of course, bigger resources, as was the case with Win 95, Win 98, XP, etc will always help. What goes unnoticed often is the xlsb, binary format file, which is specially there for speed of opening and calculation. (SP1 improved the speed a lot). Bear in mind to it is now multi-threading, so new core2 and multi-processor configurations help a lot.
3. Not in my experience, although it is limited in OpenOffice. The object model is rich in Excel, probably more than any other application with 'built-in code support. Equally with a drive toward .NET inevitable, the interop between the 'World' will become easier and easier.
4. This movement to 'the cloud' will be almost certain (IMO), however, I suspect the 'fat client' will exist for some time to come and probably never be totally left behind as, if you have used for example Google Docs on even a very fast connection, there are really frustrating lags between operation and action. far worse than any Excel 2007 performance. However, for what it is used for, portability, display, web meetings, it is more than adequate, I grant.
5. Moved to 2007 very early, very happy and reluctantly loaded 2000 back on my machine to try and stay in touch with people who still require support on the web for earlier versions.

lastly I think my love for the initial ribbon and it's development potential is well documented. V.Next will be a superb release I have no doubt. (probably not too many additions but huge amounts finished)

Thank you for answering my questions. I can see you've made the move to visual studio .net. Are you telling me that you no longer use the built in VBA editor in Excel 2007, and instead, have opted to construct .net versions of the Excel VBA macros in the visual studio environment? How do you test to see if your code works, as I understand that you cannot have Excel 2007 up and running at the same time that your visual studio has the program in its memory.

Another question for you an any other interested party: Do you think that Microsoft is going to deprecate the built in VBA editor (VBE) like they now have in Office 2007 and migrate that capability over to visual studio in the release after Office 2007? In other words, those of us who have made a substantial investment in developing Excel, Word, Outlook, and Access VBA programs will no longer have a built in VBA editor in the next release, and will be forced to spend $700US so that we can "convert" the 2007 macros into an equivalent program in the visual studio environment, is that right? In my opinion, if they did this, there would be outcries from thousands of outraged users.

I welcome anyone's opinions and thoughts on this matter.

Thank you,

Bruce

MS have gone on record as stating VBA will be available in the next version of Office. Equally, they point to their support of XLM Macros which were deprecated in V5 with the introduction of VBA (1993?).

Given that 'less used' technology than VBA I suspect you will be able to develop in VBA for at least a similar amount of time.

Given that the drive is toward .NET I suspect gradually developers will want to make that move given it's huge flexibility and that it will be the 'go-forward' technology.

As I say to people when asked. I used to work in the British Motorcycle Industry when Japanese imports were known as Jap Crap. Eventually, maybe kicking and screaming, people generally follow where the quality technology goes. After all, it is impossible to stay still if only for security reasons.

(My opinion in all cases)

Have to have my say in this as it is a very topical subject, and you are only getting one view IMO, slight variations, but one view.

I have had 2007 for some time too, and I too was at first very impressed, it does look a whole lot better on itial loading.

But, and it is a big but, there are a ton of things wrong with it. I won't even go into the ribbon, it's a bit like Marmite, you love it or hate it (I love Marmite).

So many other things are bad, the charting engine is seriously broken and needs a lot of work (such as restoring the macro recording capability). There will undoubtedly be more and more work-arounds as time passes, but these do look like own-goals to me. In addition, where they had a chance to remove all of that charting fluff they didn't bother, rather perpetuated it and made it worse - Stephen Few nicely encapsulates my view on Excel charting in this paper http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/2818.

Colours are a real mess, it is very difficult to work with them from code.

Conditional formatting, great that they have implemented unlimited conditions, but the user interface is a mess, and they have made some small but significant changes that are just wrong IMO. Personally, I think that all of those icons are just silly, and are symptomatic of what is so wrong with Excel 2007 and MS' current view of the word, style over content.

The Name manger is just not as good as Jan Karel Pieterse's  addin - why didn't they just license that off of him?

1m+ rows - WTF. This was so unnecessary IMO. 16K columns is useful (didn't need that many, but did need more). All it does it perpetuate bad spreadsheet design, in fact it escalates bad spreadsheet design to very bad spreadsheet design. Ditto more nested functions.

They integrated ATP functions ingto Excel. Except they didn't, if you use Excel in an international setting, these functions are just as useless as when they were ATP functions.

New functions. Quite good, but SUMIFS/COUNTIFS are so restricted they are almost useless, they replace about 10% of the sort of formulae that SUMPRODUCT is used for and so are a lost opportunity. And so few, IFERROR, AVERAGEIF, SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, I think that is it. IMO, the only one needed was IFERROR, they should have spent the rest of their effort on fixing some of the other functions that are not absolutely right.

And they have broken F4 big-time, why?

Hopefully, this is not seen as a big-downer on Excel 2007 and I think it is all rubbish. MS have chosen a direction and are not going to ditch that direction (I am specifically thinking about the ribbon and the integration within Office) and if we either go with it, stay with 2003, or ditch Excel. There is no point in harping on for the past, but we do need to tell MS what we think in order to improve future versions.

Unlike Nick, I don't think it is V1 of a new product, I think it is a beta release foisted on us by MS, and should never have been released in this form. I am a consultant, so I experience businesses that across the spectrum are using the whole gamut of functionality, Nick works in a more confined space ;-). I am recommending my clients to give 2007 a pass and wait and see what 2009 delivers, 2003 is still a more productive environment for most businesses I know.

I think it will be better in the next release, 2009, but I don't think as Nick does that it will be superb, as I think they have taken some wrong directions. I expect, hope, they will fix many of the problems of 2007, I fear they will add more fluff.

IMO, MS made a far bigger error with Vista, but initial previews of Windows 7 suggests that they have learnt from that release, let us hope they learn from Excel 2007.

As to OO, if you want to work with other companies, other users, I think OO is not viable at this point. If you just want it for yourself, it has advantages and disadvantages. It isn't anywhere near as good as Excel 2003 IMO.

Thanks for your feedback. When you refer to F4, are you talking about pressing the F4 key to bring up the properties window in the VBE? The company I'm with has had us migrate to Outlook/Word/Power Point 2007, but is trying to ready a custom cost estimating app (ACEIT -- if you haven't heard of it, go to http://www.aceit.com) in the .NET environment before having us migrate to Excel 2007 and the other apps in the suite (Access, Publisher and Infopath).

Thank you for mentioning the Jan Karel name addin; I will most likely add that to my Excel 2003. I am also going to read the article by Stephen Few, as I have his hard cover book: "Show Me the Numbers". Intuitively, I agree with you on OO. It appears that there are at least 10 to 20 times the number of lines of code in the OO macro environment in order to accomplish the same thing in Excel VBA.

No, I was referring to the use in Excel of the F4 key. In many situations, you could use F4 to repeat the last action, and many of these have been disabled in Excel 2007.

I don't have that Stephen  Few book, but I do have others, and similar visual slanted tomes by Tufte, that are hugely important for anyone interested in the visual presentation of information.

NameManager is a great utility. I resisted it for a long time, thinking that I was far too capable to need such an adidn(:-)). But since I have loaded it, I use it all the time (I even built another addin using NameManager as an inspiration), and now wouldn't b e without it.

Regarding the built-in VBA editor, that's correct: as much as I can, I avoid using VBA. I try to do everything using either standard Excel cell formulas, or write a .NET/VSTO add-in to do the heavy lifting. Paradoxically, it is because I want to know that my code works that I do that: I find VBA painful to maintain, even when it is well written. If the application is big, I prefer to write a dll with automated unit tests, which I can easily run to check if my stuff works - and have an add-in with minimum responsibilities, such as reading data from workbooks into the engine, or writing out outputs.

That being said, I don't think my approach is very typical. It has its costs and benefits, and works for the type of projects/situations I deal with, such as "upgrading" large Excel models which reach the limits and begin to fall apart...

And I believe MSFT has expressed that they would support VBA, for exactly the reasons you mention.

Cheers,

Mathias