Andrew Ziem takes a close look at Microsoft Word performance in a benchmark with 4500 measurements in 5 categories covering 6 versions and 12 years of releases to determine whether Word has become slower or faster over the years.
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Member since:2007-02-17
Office 97 is very weak for long documents.
Office 97 has a strictly limited "style store". Once you explicitly format something, every time you make a change that new format gets stored in the file. There is apparently a list of these "explicit formats used" kept with the file that can only ever be added to ... removing stuff from your document does not remove the entries in that list. There is no way to reduce the size of this list in a given document ... as you add stuff, and change formatting, the list just grows and grows.
Once the list hits 65,000 entries, the document is permanently corrupted. No recovery is possible. Not even saving to another format and re-importing will recover the document.
You cannot use Office 97 for a longish document for which sections get replaced on a regular basis.
Even for a short document ... say a newsletter which you edit each week but leave certain bits in place ... Office 97 is guaranteed to eventually corrupt such a file beyond all repair.
Far from "perfected".
Member since:2006-02-19
I have to agree with you on those points. Don't get me wrong, I think that Office 97 was leaps and bounds better then any office to that point I think Office really hit the mark with 2003. I have 2003 on one machine and 2007 on the other, and I still prefer 2003 to the ui and clutter that is 2007. I really do prefer the menus and toolbars versus the no menus and ribbon of 2k7. I guess that is what you get from being a long time Office user... ;-)
Member since:2006-02-05
I am a casual office user, and 2k7 is the only office suite of any kind that hasn't made me want to run screaming for the hills.
Previously, writing anything beyond memos meant large amounts of time trying to find features, and then figure out how they work. Most of my word usage is writing specs and documentation, and neither is a task that I do every day (or every month for that matter). I found OO.o just as bad, just where the little word expertise I retained ended up being useless.
With 2k7 it is like night and day. Not only is it easier to find stuff, but there are a lot of desktop publishing features that I don't remember ever being there before, and putting out documents that look good is very, very easy.
Office is always something I had to use at work, 2k7 is the first version I actually went out and bought. If you are a pro at the older versions, there isn't much of a need to upgrade. But if you are an infrequent user (like me), you have two choices, office 2k7 or iWork on mac.
Member since:
2006-07-25
Personally i think they perfected office apart from outlook in office 97. All the funcationaility was there, as was the polish.
The network i currently manage is on office xp (2002) i see no reason to move to office 2007, i have applied the office 2007 compatability pack to Office XP so they can read and write to the newer format.
To tell the truth the only reason i would move everyone to a newer office suite would be to start the conversion of office documents to an open and compatible format, however as i said this is a long way off. Office XP does everything we need.
The only app i think microsoft did complete/finish in Office 2007 was outlook, it's great for productivity and the management of Email, Calendar and contacts, especially when used with Exchange Server.