I'm a fairly heavy Excel user. We've got Office 2007 at work now - and I did lose a few hours of productivity when we switched, but the features for Pivot Tables (I use extensively) are much better than earlier versions.

For those functions that are hidden or buried under the "ribbon", you can customize the toolbar in about 5 minutes and add what you want to be available with 1 click. This same feature is available in the entire Office suite.

Office 07 isn't an upgrade from 03. I've been inundated with questions from coworkers who foolishly decided to get the new version earlier this year. They've bought books, used the built in help function, explored menus, and asked the young guy but after a year or so I can't think of any of them who prefer the new version. That should say something.

Change can be good, but sometimes it can be really dumb.

you can easily fix that in 2010. You can add the print button (or any button or function) to the main page of the ribbon bar.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1292475256.jpg

Get 2010, it's also cheaper than it used to be because the non-Access version (Home & Office) now comes with Outlook.

It's similar to '07 with some polish added to the ribbons, and the save/print menu is way better and super useful once you're used to it's different look.

MBAtarga, download the trial of 2010 and check out PowerPivot (I think that's what it's called, free addon), and some of the other pivot table improvments. The best one in my mind is the not being tied to a default db in the DSN, which really annoyed me before, and other fancy stuff that I don't care to learn (overall I'm against pivot tables since we use WAY too many of them in odd ways :) )

Haven't tried 2010, but "upgraded" to 2007 a bit over a year ago at work. Huge mistake. I'm still trying to figure out how to do things that I could do effortlessly in Office 2000.

I don't get why Microsoft feels the need to completely change the interface of a product that many of their customers have been using for well over a decade. Improvement? Hardly. 2007 has cost me countless hours that could have been spent doing my job, not learning a new piece of software. :mad:

Downloaded Open Office for the home machines, but haven't had a chance to play with it much.

We were using Open Office on the "spare" machine for a while and on the Netbooks. I did not like using Outlook Express for the primary Mail interface. The Open Office version of Outlook is Thunderbird and it is not an equal.

To be fair, I liked 2000. I am not a heavy Office user and 2000 did everything I needed .
Office 2010 was taking longer to load, the ribbon thing was confusing and I did not feel
like taking the time to re-learn software for no more than I used it

Definitely valid points. Everywhere that I've had it, it takes longer to load, and the ribbon definitely slows me down compared to the menus that have existed for so long. Not only that, but the ribbon takes u a lot of space vertically. Even on a large monitor, I prefer a thin strip of text menus.

Double click the heading of one of the ribbons, it'll minimize, then only pop open when you click it.

Or get a bigger monitor. :)

I'm at 1920x1200 now. I don't want to spend the bucks for something at 2500x2000 right now.