For word processors and spreadsheets particularly, they aren’t advancing very far or fast anymore. Therefore new versions bring less and less to the party.

Or as Terry Pratchett put it in one of the Discworld novels, “It’s really quite intuitive after you’ve used it for a few months.”

And Dwight @5, don’t forget the best reason for changing the Office interfaces: All that lovely money from people taking the courses to update their “Microsoft Professional Certification” to the new version.

I don’t have a mac, so I can’t try TextEdit, but I’d much rather contend with an alternate word processor which didn’t try to be just like Word, and worry about converting later. I can always send PDFs.

For the average user, though, World ’10 is too much.

Moreover, I wish it was easier to make it dumber. For example, it knows dozens of fonts, but there are only about four or five that are acceptable for use in my professional life. It autocorrects things that I don’t want autocorrected (for example, turning (c) into the copyright sign) until you train it otherwise. There are many other features that I simply do not want to have availalble. There are only a handful of non-standard symbols I use and the rest are clutter. The auto-outline function is the devil.

On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to cheaply and easily upgrade the spelling dictionary, so that anthropology and legal words that I use which are correctly spelled don’t get flagged as potential misspellings without having to manually put in every single one.

If you write equations in Word as such, install Design Science MathType 6.7 or later for Windows. Math Type substantially lowers your Homicidal Rage Index (generically medicated with LaTex).

That said, what’s with the goddamn default Calibri font that tries to sneak in through every crack even after the entire document’s been assigned a different font?

I’m still using 2007 because that is what I teach to the kids. It wasn’t, in my view an improvement over 2002/2003. (I didn’t notice the version I had at home was 2002 until after I upgraded to 2007.)

What I have noticed is that overly elaborate formatting in Office in long documents is sooner or latter going to get messed up especially if you do a lot of editing. I have also noticed that saving highly edited documents in open source format will make the document smaller then you close it and open the file in open source format and save it in the original format and it is still much smaller. It is obvious to me that Office does save a lot of crap that you don’t want it saving. They claim you can turn this off but I don’t trust it.

I found that being mildly paranoid and covering your rear is better than getting blind sided.

In my experience, if you use these every day, the new style is much better. And if you are completely new, then the new UI is much easier to learn. The people who hate the UI seem to be people who only use it occasionally, so can’t keep up with the changes every few years.

And as long as we are throwing out credentials: I’m a CS PhD (I teach, hence ppt), wrote my own OS as my thesis, do research involving the linux kernel, and use vim/latex for most of my serious writing. But openoffice is, sadly, not production quality. Hence windows for PPT and excel.