Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Windows Vista and Office 2007 pros and cons of upgrading

I have been playing with Vista and Office 2007 for 3-4 months now.

Interestingly enough, while I took the opportunity to upgrade all our pcs on our network (7 at present) to Office 2007, I have uninstalled Vista from the trial machine and won't be reinstalling it in the near future.

I have done some searching around and I am not alone in this opinion. Robin Good writes an article on the pros and cons of upgrading an quotes from the Becta report on this subject. They found no reason to upgrade either application at the present (in educational institutions).

In contrast I have found Office 2007 to be good and a definite improvement on the old gui - though there is not a lot of functionality increase, there is enough to warrant the change.
For me the most important reasons to change were Smart Art, Smart Art and Smart Art. Seriously this is an awesome improvement on the previous 1980s clip art.
Additionally the improved object formatting for pictures, charts and other objects massively improves the look of these elements in any PowerPoint, excel file or word document. The 3d options are particularly impressive.

The container zip/xml idea for the file formats is a technical discussion for another time, however I will point out what I believe is the most important user application of this concept. The ability to rapidly re theme an entire document with a couple of clicks is awesome. By stripping the formatting styles away from the content the user has the ability to completely redesign a document in a few seconds down to highlights on letters and words, underlines, headers and footers, charts and tables etc.
Check out the excellent articles, tutorials and videos on how to make this work on the Microsoft Office Word Teams Blog.
Building Blocks Part 1
Building Blocks Part 2
Building Blocks Part 3

For me this is a huge productivity gain and one of the main reasons I upgraded.
The backward compatibility of files is good and provides an easy way to save files for users who need the previous versions. I know it was a long time ago but the Office 95 to Office 97 suite change was probably more painful than this one and there was relatively minor gui changes in that upgrade.

I would recommend upgrading to Office 2007 in any of these circumstances;
- where you can ensure that most of your users are upgrading virtually simultaneously
- where you are using Sharepoint 2007
- where most of your documents and excel files are not linked together - test any linked files work before upgrading permanently

Vista however is another story.
As indicated by Robin Good's article there is a large amount of the candy in Vista that is either unnecessary, causes go slows on the PC, or is readily available free (open source).

Simply the biggest problem right now for Vista upgraders is the difficulty getting drivers that work together, and applications that need vendor patches / new versions. In other words, your previous computer worked fine on XP and did all the activities you needed to do, burned CDs, edited PDF documents in Adobe, used virtual cd drives and played your favorite games. After the upgrade to Vista don't expect to be able to perform these fairly basic tasks.

Fortunately there is assistance. The Microsoft supplied Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor is designed to tell you how good Vista is and that your pc can handle it (or may need more RAM etc). However fortunately it also scans applications and hardware and considers whether or not they will work in Vista. I had 9 applications and 5 hardware devices that wouldn't work in Vista on the one PC I ran this on. I am not sure if the application scan and results are performed live on the machine or performed against a checklist of applications in a table in the application. Ethe way, I am not installing Vista!

Good news though for those who must have it. Get The full Vista Ultimate version for the basic upgrade price. Follow these instructions carefully to get Vista cheap and for this to work. The Register performed this and successfully got a full working licensed install of Vista from the upgrade.


Posted by: Jethro | 11:52 PM |