Thing #18: Office 2007

One day, a few months ago, I came in to work, double-clicked on my trusty Word icon, and whammo! What was this?? Everything was different!

I had been transported into the magical world of Office 2007, and my life would never be the same.

Well, okay, my life was basically the same. But my experience of using Microsoft Office, particuarly MS Word, was not.

Here are some things I like better about the new version of Word:

• Sliding bar to zoom bigger or smaller-- easy! intuitive! I use this a lot, especially when printing up big song lyrics to display at story times.
• No more paperclip office assistants! (I always did think that paperclip was creepy...)
• Strikethrough font now has its very own menu button!
• New menu design makes it quick & easy to change paper orientation from portrait to landscape, insert page breaks, and do other tasks.

And here are some aspects of Word 2007 that have been, er, challenging for me:

• The automatic double-spacing in the default format is awkward
• I'm finding it harder to change the margins to non-standard sizes
• There have been version compatability issues on some computer terminals, making it impossible to save a document until the hardworking Technical Services folks come and do something to the computer to fix it
• I've had a hard time getting used to the menu bar at the top; there are menu items I've been using for literally decades that just aren't where they've always been. The help system seems pretty good, and I've been able to use it to find some things that mystified me (like the "Select all" button), but it's definitely a learning curve.

All in all it looks like the new version is a Good Thing: more powerful, more features, and sometimes even more intuitive. It's going to take me a while to get used to it, though.