Yiddish is so expressive, No?
Decided it might be interesting to try out a newer version of Word and decided to give Office 2007—released Tuesday January 30th—a try. The Home and Student Version is affordable and contains Power Point and Excel as well as the much-vaunted new One Note about which I was curious. After considerable research I discovered that Microsoft is offering it in a downloadable trial version. I suppose I should be thankful for Sympatico's unlimited bandwidth policy—the download is 300 MB—and the speed of my connection—I successfully got it in less than 30 minutes at 8:00 PM in the evening.
I must say that the install went cleanly and without incident though once again I must comment about the incredulity felt by a customer who must immediately download and install updates for software that has just been released. Why didn't they do it right in the first place? The trial period is gracious being 60 days and was offered pre-release in stores. Attempted to add some templates to One Note and discovered that some of them didn't seem to arrive.
Things started going wrong when I decided to try out Word 2007. In the first place documents created in this new version are not backward compatible—unless you install a 27 MB converter pack. When I clicked on the shortcut to open the programme the cobwebs started growing as I waited for it to load—Microsoft gives you no option to disable the splash screen as any programme of theirs opens. The first thing that hit me when it did open was the fact that the Graphical User Interface occupies the top half of one's screen. In a continuing campaign to dumb down its programming Microsoft has abandoned smartcoms in favour of showing the user all the options visually. If this is any indication of what Vista is going to be like I'll be avoiding it like the plague—at least XP gave one the option of using a "classic" desktop. The final nail in the coffin came when I clicked on the "Send To" Menu—E-mail options were all grayed out. Obviously this Word does not recognize Outlook Express, (at least in Windows XP), and Outlook doesn't come with this version of Office. Since writing E-mail is 95% of my purpose in using Word its fate was now sealed.
After the requisite shut down of running programmes I went through the uninstall process and rebooted. Word 2002 then needed some repairing and the settings had to be restored—luckily I used the utility to back them up earlier. Satisfied that everything was now working properly I went back into Windows Settings and disabled Restore—I don't trust it normally, finding it uses too much space and doesn't do as much as claimed; then I deleted the download.
In summary, One Note may be a useful programme but Ever Note Lite does all the same things and for free! I've never used Power Point so I don't know what I'm missing and I'm swimming in spread sheet programmes so I don't actually need Excel. Guess I'll be sticking with Works Suite. I like to update Streets and Trips every now and then along with Encarta but may wait another year for that. Buying the entire Suite is cheaper than getting individual updates. So there you have it. I suppose I should be thankful that the free trial enabled me to make these discoveries at no cost beyond my time.
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