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It’s been awhile, but for what it’s worth, the time has been spent planning a great Word vNext. Stay tuned for vNext posts.
Anyway, while we have been working on vNext, we have certainly not forgotten about Word vNow (Word 2007) or Word vPast (Word 2003, XP, or 2000). In fact, during a trip I took last week to visit my family in Chicago and Columbus, OH, I spent a few hours familiarizing my mother, father, and brother with Word 2007 and was re-inspired to help ease the transition to Word 2007.
I told them was that there are two high-level things about Word 2007 that are much different than any previous version:
1. A new user interface
2. A new file format
And that while both of these things come with a learning curve, the learning curve can be overcome by doing three things:
1. Understanding at a very high level the ‘paradigm’ of the new user interface
2. Installing and using the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 interactive guides
3. Using the compatibility tools we’ve created.
My hope is that the remainder of this post will quickly help you do all three.
Here’s my ‘quick fix’ to any pain caused by the new user interface of Word 2007:
· Commands exist within Tabs which describe a type of activity/scenario you may want to perform.
· When you want to Insert a table, go to the Insert tab. When you want to change your View of your document, go to the View tab. Etc.
· If none of the Tabs match what you are trying to do, use the Word 2007 guide to tell you exactly where the command is.
Whether you have Word 2007 or not, you likely know about the file formats new to Word 2007. If you have Word 2007 you’ve likely noticed that by default you are creating .docx files vs. .doc files (the “x” stands for XML). If you have pre-Word 2007 you’re hopefully one of the millions who have downloaded the Compatibility Pack so that you can open, edit, and save .docx files (interesting fact: the Compatibility Pack is the second most downloaded product on the Microsoft Download Center…behind Internet Explorer 7).
Either way, you have likely faced one of these two issues (below), both resulting in sadness:
· You are a Word 2007 user and had someone that couldn’t open one of your files
· You are not a Word 2007 user and couldn’t open a file created by someone with Word 2007.
We know about this sadness and have released a whitepaper that details all of the tools available for Word 2007, 2003, XP, and 2000 users to help ease this pain.
In sum, the whitepaper talks about the following tools:
1. The Compatibility Pack
a. Eases life for Word 2003, XP, and 2000 users by enabling them to open, edit, and save documents in the file formats new to Word 2007 directly from within Word 2003, XP, and 2000.
2. The Compatibility Checker
a. Eases life for Word 2007 users by telling them users how pre-2007 users will experience a given document
3. The Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM)
a. Eases life for IT administrators planning to deploy Word 2007 by scanning documents for compatibility issues and suggesting ways to address potential issues.
4. The Word 2007 Policy Settings: Allows Word 2007 to save in the legacy .doc format by default.
And also lays out different deployment/installation scenarios and how you can apply these tools to those scenarios.
Of course you can get more info in our previous posts on compatibility and the Compatibility Pack.
Hope this helps & hope you are enjoying the summer.
-Jonathan
Comments: (18) Collapse
Thanks Jonathan - nice explanation
can you link up the whitepaper please?
Reposting with links (not sure what happened there...sorry about that). -Jonathan
can you repost the "Migrating to the 2007 Office System.docx" document, this one does not give you a brilliant user experience ;-)
Opening the document it says that the document is corrupted
It's me again with one more issue: On state-of-the art dual core client machines with 2GB of RAM Word 2007 German on Win XP is reacting quite slow when scrolling through documents with the mouse wheel or typing text. However you can experience a big speed improvement if you disable automatic spell checking! Doesn't spell checking happen in the background on Word 2007 so the user does not experience a slow-down when working with the document?
Is anyone else seeing the corruption issue Stefan is seeing? I've opened the file on three machines and it seems to be working. Stefan - Could you try to open it on another machine and let me know if you see the same issue? -Jonathan
Jonathan, I've tried it right now with Word 2002 (!) on my home machine and it opened ok... But there's also an inactive parallel installation of Office 2007 B2TR on it. At work it happened on each of several machines with Office 2000. Since I'm on holiday I've got no access to my test lab @work the next weeks. So it would be really great if some readers would open the example documents from pschmid.net/.../viewtopic.php and post if they experience the wrong font problem as well (including Word versions installed on machine & language). Thank you very much!!
Speaking of fonts, is there any way to force Word to embed common system fonts in PDFs? The PDFs I create with Word are getting rejected for printing because Arial is not embedded.
can somebody please tell me how I can save as in the new word and excell, it's driving me crazy to have to find my docs then copy and paste before I can overwrite.
I use Word 2002 SP 3. Since installing the Compatibility Pack I am now experiencing difficulty saving any Office document. When I click on "save as" the Save Document box opens relatively quickly, but when I click on "save in" I experience an inordinate delay before the drop down containing the folder list appears. Is there a known conflict between the Compatibility Pack and the version of Office I am running?
@trina: There's some big round button in the upper left corner of the window. Try it out. If it flashes you've never pressed it yet. @David: I don't think it has to do with the compatibility pack, since I had the problem before. Please check if there are any hard readable CDs or drives mounted or anything else stops windows to get information about the drives and folders. Disable other tools installed to find out.
Hi, I got a different question, but I didn't found a better place to post it. I'm dealing with the problem of using a SharePoint contact list with the mail merge functionalities in Word 2007 respectively Word 2003.
I'd like to get the information directly from the contact list in SharePoint. What is the best way to do it in Word 2007 and Word 2003? thx for your help
regards,
david
What would really ease the use of Office 2007 would be rolling out the compatibility pack in some kind of Office service pack so that the new document forat is easier to share with others. Is there any plan to do so in the near future ?
I am beginning to use the developer tab in Word. Why isn't there a preset content control for a mail merge? I am trying to create a template that will use content controls to draw from an Outlook contact list. Is there currently any features in Word 2007 that will allow me to do this?
Below info in interest of removing Trial; also
to advise shoppers to beware that your old version of Office may be removed without your
prior knowledge. Any workarounds for deleting
- as MS requested - Office 2007 trial. The
interface is not ready for prime time as I
tested it for a major studio. MS OFC Pro 2007 Trial Version 12.0.4518.1014 Product ID: 81605-302-2402231-65701 On CP/Removal, Setup Error Message: "The language of this installation package is not supported by your system."
When you place a watermark in a document, you get a dialog box that gives you several choices. Among them are a number of standard text watermarks eg: Draft, COPY etc. Is there a way to add other choices to that dropdown?
Comments: (loading) Collapse