The new features in Office 2007 made me want to give it a try to see if it was any kind of improvement on Office 2003. Thing is, whenever Microsoft releases an “upgrade”, it often becomes a downgrade. How does Office 2007 hold up? Read on, where I explain why I want to call this thing MS Office Vista.

Office 2003 was your typical Windows application–menu bar at the top, a toolbar or two beneath it. You got used to working with it that way. Office 2007 introduces a new toolbar approach that puts commonly used styling and features in a large bar at the top of the screen, but with no menu bar. For common functions, you click on a large glass Office button in the upper left corner.

I have mixed feelings about this. I can see its advantage for someone who is overwhelmed with the array of menu choices and buttons to click in Office 2003. But for a normal user like me? It’s counter-intuitive. In short, this interface is a mess. There is no way to go back to a classic interface, where I could count on many features being available in well-known menu locations or toolbar buttons. Yeah, the glossy appearance looks cool, but in some cases it just slows me down having to hunt through all of that gloss to find the formatting feature I need.

So, why do we need all new file formats yet again? MS could easily have standardized and used an XML-based format that would have been compatible with other office applications out there. But no, they have yet again introduced another incompatible file format for all of their office apps. So, naturally, I had to go into all of the configuration options to make sure these programs all saved in their respective Office 97-2003 formats. I think few people out there will upgrade to 2007 right away, so at least I can still send files to them if needed.

Finally, this abomination is slow. You would think they could streamline the code and make it run snappy. But no–this is slower than Office 2003, which itself was no prize in the speed department. Not only is it slower in some operations, the File/Open dialog is slow enough to give you time to get up and make a pot of tea. We’ve had the same file dialogs since Win95 came out all those years ago, and it has worked fine. Now, when you open an Office document, you get a nag screen saying the app is “initializing the root folders for display”. What the hell is that supposed to mean? XP already knows how to display folders…now we just have a nag screen that sits there for a minute, green progress bar drifting back and forth, with no disk activity to be seen (or heard). I dread using it to browse for files. Instead, I’m opening an Explorer window and dragging the file into an empty Office application. Oh, and you can’t have anything else open, or the app will drop that file as an object into the middle of your document.

I am calling this Microsoft Office Vista, much like we had MS Office XP back in the day. Just like Vista, it’s glossier, flashier, slower, and offers no real reason to upgrade. Vista has really been getting panned in the computing press for offering very little improvement in features, but introducing so much code bloat that you need insane levels of CPU and memory to make it work anywhere near as good as XP. I am usually anxious to upgrade the OS, but Vista is widely considered to be a downgrade. Even MS knows they are faltering, as vendors are beginning to ask for XP over Vista for new machines, and MS is extending support for XP longer than they had planned. With that in mind, Office Vista…OK, 2007…is the perfect companion for the Vista OS.

As for me, I’m really tempted to dig out my old Office 2000 CD and reinstall it, from the days when Office actually ran halfway decent on one’s computer…