Richard Ericson has a very useful review of Office 2007 in Computerworld. It sounds like a user like me will get nothing of real value out of it, except that I’m a power-user of PowerPoint, so I’ll likely have to make the switch.

The review doesn’t mention whether Microsoft has managed to fix the Word revision tracking bugs that have been there for the past ten years. And not just the bug that causes files to go corrupt if they’re too heavily revised. I mean things like not handling paragraph joins correctly; after backspacing two paragraphs together, the only way to get rid of the invisible paragraph marker that remains is to delete a few characters backwards and a few characters forward of the join. Also, if multiple people go through multiple revision cycles, I haven’t found a way to show only the latest revision’s changes by a particular person. Also, if you toggle off displaying your revisions to a document and then make a change, it toggles the display back on.

I don’t know what software number Office is up to, but maybe after spending another $329 to upgrade to the Professional version (which should be called the Penultimate version since $539 is the upgrade price for the Ultimate version), I’ll have a word processor with rev tracking that works.

Or maybe it’s time to switch to Open Office for real. (Alas, I seem to be stuck with PowerPoint, though. I use all its animation features and I can’t show up to give a speech for which I’m paid with a presentation that my hosts can’t run.) [Tags: microsoft office reviews]

Categories: Uncategorized dw