Office 2007 dubbed 'brave'

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL has dubbed Microsoft Office 2007's new design 'brave' and says it will force a steep learning curve for users.

The WSJ, which is probably going to be a major influence on corporate buyers of the software, said that Office's new user interface which replaces menus with a ribbon of tabbed icons might be a bit much for companies to swallow.

It points out that everything that was familiar in Office has now been chucked out and there is no way that Vole will let users go back to their own interface either.

This mean that all users are going to have to take extensive training courses to master the new concepts which will jack up the price of any roll out considerably.

To make matters worse, Vole has changed the standard file format for Office files. Older versions of Office won't be able to read these new file types without special conversion software.

This would be fine if all companies rolled out Office 2007 throughout their organisation at the same time. But the reality is that few outfits ever do this and there is a large chunk of terminals that will always run the older software.

This will mean that these will have to be equipped with conversion software if they are going to talk to the rest of the business.

Reviewers have been saying that the Microsoft way of working Office is much better, but say it is extremely brave of Vole to force users down that path.

But looking it from the CIO perspective the cost of rolling out Office 2007 is going to be far greater than earlier upgrades.

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