Office 2010 beta Impressions: Word

Can't say I've noticed much with it....must mean it's a 'painless' development...mostly I'd been on Office XP but since TechNet it's Office 2007 and now 2010...;)

I've been a Word user since 1991, and it has been my central work app since '99 or so. The ribbon has turned out to be a complete hassle, trashing many years of experience that used to mean something on my resume. Is there any chance that 2010 has made some effort to step back from the Office team's aggressive disinterest in the investments made by countless individual users and organizations who learned and use and customize Word in 'the old world?'

Why pay for an Office version when OpenOffice is available?

On my school, the IT department says they won't switch because then the stupid personell would have to be taught to use the new program and that is time they don't work....my solution: Fire the dumb and bring in the smart (unfortunetly, that wouldn't be possible....)

I'm enjoying the Office 2010 Beta as well. I use Outlook more than any of the other applications in the suite. It runs flawlessly on W7 64-bit. I like the improvements so far - especially "Quick Steps" and the new grouping options. I believe the final will be out before my TechNet subscription expires.

OpenOffice has limitations and issues that most home users aren't going to encounter, but if you use excel for 8 hours a day in a work enviroment, you are going to hit those problems fairly often. Having said that, most the businesses around here are on or in some cases just switched to 2003, they're not going 2010 anytime soon so my 2007 version should last me for sometime, and I see no reason to switch. If school programs and work enviroments hadn't required me to do certain things, programs like OpenOffice would have been fine. for my personal use. I had my parents use Open Office, 99% of the time they won't even use a spreadsheet.

MS had better fix the patent infringement with i4i before January or no one is going to see Office on the shelves.

A school is not about to place non-industry standard software ,like Open Office, into a learning environment. Business expects employees to use Office. It would put students at a disadvantage.

We still use Office 2003 at work, it does its job very well and I can't see us upgrading anytime soon!

No chance, but there are things like this for people that want the old menus:

http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/

Appart from that, I'm loving the 2010 Beta, specially the new OneNote (the Outlook upgrade is nice too, but I just love OneNote).

I like the innovation, and the interface is slick, if complicated (got a steep learning curve here). OneNote is a great innovation. When I compare Word to Open Office, Word 2010 wins hands down across the board.

One thing I'm going to be looking for is tutorials.

It doesn't skin, so I'm sticking with Office 2003.

Thanks for the tip; that custom tab could be soothing for a bit of my work (I prefer to see the style & font info for wherever my cursor is resting), but it can't help me build the custom menus and toolbars that I still quite miss.

My problem with the ribbon hasn't been so much about being annoyed at having to re-find old things; it's that the Word keeps making wrong decisions about what I'm doing and taking away UI that I want to see. The keyboard support bites utterly, which slows a touch-typist like me down significantly. And I don't want to get started on the complete trainwreck that happened to named styles...

Care to elaborate about keyboard support? As far as I knew shortcuts where maintained accross versions (although I'm not a word poweruser, so I can't bet on that). But this feedback could be interesting, so please go on

Keep in mind that these are random grumbles and not a methodical critique--

Top keyboard grudge in ribbon-land is that the UI no longer helps you learn keyboard paths. Until this change, you could tell any Office app to put underscores on menu commands so you know how to hit them with the keyboard. Some unknown but large chunk of my former speed was not that I remembered exactly how to get to some less-used feature or even how to do a complicated thing regularly without looking at the screen.

Right close behind that is the loss of customization. I don't have the volume of same-type documents pass through my hands that I did back when Office XP was in beta, but I still get piles of things with repetitive task requirements that I could push through more quickly if I could just build a little toolbar and give it the keyboard commands I wanted.

Being able to customize 'properly' would also be a big help for me in the general process of copy editing, which often includes cleaning up great piles of paste-dung left behind by folks who have no idea what the Paste Options button is for. Previously, I could use the Standard toolbar to keep an eye on the style and font info without having to mouse around for that ghostly minitoolbar. When I started stepping through tracks or comments, I could float the Reviewing toolbar and leave it where I wanted to have it, minimizing my need to move the pointer around.

Heh. Touch typing can get out of hand quickly. But you asked...

I've never really cared for Word that much. It makes thing difficult when they should be simple. For some reports I do I prefer to work in Excel!

If you want to try Office 2010 beta yourself:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/download-office-professional-plus/default.aspx

I'm very fond of Excel even though I'm not a hardcore numbers guy. I keep my timesheets in it and am more likely to type a formula in a cell for a quick number than I am to find and start the Windows calculator. But I'm an old right-tool-for-the-job guy, and if a report needs much more text than labels, it needs to use Excel as a data source, not a delivery format. Of course that's just more whining from one of those folks who can't stand watching PowerPoint become the only thing that management and sales types will even notice, much less read...

It's useful feedback, so don't feel bad for writing walls of text Some things about your post:

- About the keyboard paths, I don't have Office 2007 right now, but in 2010 that exists too (you press Alt and you get all the keys for the shortcuts).

- And about the customization and toolbars, there are tools for that too: http://word.mvps.org/FAQS/Customization/CustomizeRibbon.htm

Hope it helps!

I agree that Excel might be useful for certain tasks, though in my experience I only used it for Physics experiments.

But as for Word and Powerpoint, the only other Office programs I have ever properly used (ignoring Outlook), I can see why normal users use them, but don't see the reasons for fairly frequent occurrence in non-scientific technical documents, where it competes with LaTeX.

Although I am a CompSci, I am very much the kind of person who appreciates Windows-like GUI and who doesn't like the standard "get your collection of random flags" UNIX way of controlling a machine. And still, I find LaTeX by far the easiest thing to use after some investment of time, especially as, in conjunction with templates, I need to remember roughly 3 commands in order to get superbly formatted documents while writing just what I mean.

Re: Loss of customization with the ribbon:  You can customize the ribbon in Office 2010, just check the Options dialog

True true

Unless I'm missing something, it sounds like you're confusing the Quick Access clutter on the title bar with the ribbon; it's a handy workaround for a few basic things (you can 9 or ten ALT+A_Number hotkeys that way), but not what I really need. And I guess I should admit I know about and have puttered with the Developer ribbon, but the problem is that the 'customization' options I can find are simply more of the same too-helpful ribbon worldview and not a way to properly take control of a specialized doc-work context.

No, the ribbon is now customizable in addition to the quick access area.

First preview of Brad's new book.

I have 2007 and am testing 2010 on another machine, I have never been a big fan of the ribbon. I have an after market Item that give me the old memu bar it works in 2007 and 2010. I like the new outlook. it sends the mail to the different users. Each user has his or her own in box and that alone is woth the change to me to at lest have OUTLOOK 2010

That sounds encouraging in plain English. Can you float ribbons and dock them on the sides and bottom of windows in 2010.

Edit: After a much-needed-scrap-of-a-day being able to bill for time spend in Word, I might have learned how to decently describe the heart of my frustration over the radical ribbon revolution, and it might not be entirely about the ribbon after all. To me, it seems like the Word UI has basically given up on a text-centered approach to writing and editing (tragically illogical as that might sound). I understand that some chunks of text might be intended for final delivery via a PC-related rig that's far better than what I have to work with. But why the fuck did Normal view have to go away? I understand that most of the audience for the products my patrons commission are using really new rigs with nice big landscape/letterbox displays. But why eliminate Word's former ability to let production folks focus exclusively on content and structure at the raw text and outline level?

You can't right now (and I personally doubt it will be added).

I'm not a poweruser, so maybe I say a nonsense, but there seem to be several views in Word (print, reading, web, outline and draft), aren't those the ones you are referring to?