Raise your hand if you have the new Microsoft Office 2007….  Raise your hand if you hate the new tab based interface in Word and Excel….  Wow, same number of hands!

I am not sure what Microsoft was thinking with this new interface.  I have not found one person that likes this new interface.  In fact, most people really hate it.  It is so much slower to use, not shortcut key friendly and just not the same.

It is harder to find things than before, the menus are gone, it is just frustrating to use.  And the other frustrating thing is you do not have a choice.  There is no option to go back to the way it was before.  I applaud trying to improve on an interface but if you are going to make such a drastic change at least give the option to go back to the old way.  I mean this is not just a simple interface change like a new menu or maybe moving a couple of things around and re-organizing, this is a whole shift away from the way we have been using every program since the beginning of windows.

It is so frustrating that I now use other tools more and then paste in the text and tweak it after I get it in.  The same changes were made in Excel and Word.  I have had this update now for a few months and I still cannot find some of the features that were there before.  I am sure they are there somewhere but I sure cannot find them and I refuse to have to use help to learn how to use Microsoft Word.  After all, I have been using it for at least more than 14 years.  I should not have to use help.

Now, I have been ranting on how bad the new Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel are in Office 2007.  I must say I really like the new Outlook in Office 2007.  There have been some nice additions in there and they did not mess with the user interface and menus like they did in Word and Excel.

Microsoft…  Either go back to the old user interface or at least give the option to use the old interface.  Oh, and fire the person who designed the new interface!

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