Microsoft Office 2007: Do you need it?

Today on Future Tense (RealAudio - MP3 - iTunes), I talked with Julio Ojeda-Zapata of the St. Paul Pioneer Press about Microsoft Office 2007, which goes on sale Jan. 30 (along with an operating system called Vista - perhaps you've heard of it).  Ojeda-Zapata reviewed Office 2007 in today's paper.

I don't recommend that every Office user rush to upgrade because nothing about Office 2007 is revolutionary, only evolutionary. I'll keep using the old Word 2000 to bang out my Pioneer Press copy, and it'll do me just fine; ditto for my trusty Outlook 2003.

For those in the market for Office-like software, Microsoft is far from the only option, too. Several free or low-cost alternatives merit close scrutiny (more on those in a bit).

The new Office (due Jan. 30; go to www.microsoft.com/office) is a terrific upgrade, for those who can justify the cost.

One of the free options mentioned in the review is Open Office, which I also endorse.  As good as Open Office is, I don't understand why more people aren't using it.  No marketing muscle I guess.

David Pogue wrote about Office 2007 in a recent New York Times review.  Pogue laments the fattening of Office over the years, but praises the svelte new 2007 version.

So what did Microsoft do then? It began shrinking Microsoft Office. In fact, the chief sales point of Office 2007 (for Windows XP or Vista), which arrives on Jan. 30, is that it’s simpler, it’s more streamlined and its documents take up far less disk space.

After a radical redesign, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are almost totally new programs. There are no more floating toolbars; very few tasks require opening dialog boxes, and even the menu bar itself is gone. (Evidently, even Microsoft saw the need for a major feature purge. “We had some options in there that literally did nothing,” said Paul Coleman, a product manager.)

Instead, almost the entire world of formatting options has been dug out of Office’s guts and artfully arranged on a top-mounted strip of controls called the Ribbon.

There's a downside to such a "radical redesign," however.  You'll have to throw out a lot of Office muscle memory.

The bad news, of course, is that this Office bears very little resemblance to the one you may have spent years learning. Virtually everything has been moved around or renamed. Count on a couple of weeks of frustration as you play the free bonus game called Find the Feature.

Having never become an Office master, I won't mind having to play Find the Feature.  I don't know where all the features are right now.    Most reviewers say Office 2007 is much easier to use, and I hope it's true.  I've spent many hours ripping my hair out over Word quirks.

Here's my interview with Ojeda-Zapata, via the Odeo player: