My experience with Office 2007 doesn’t go beyond the beta. But with v2003 and previous ones i did use it daily in my work and private life of course.

What i really miss in so called new versions to convince me to switch is the ‘lack of gui enhancement’. I’d rate rexpect some “revolutionary new” GUI to get an aging donkey – like me – a new start.

I come from the engineering field so i have to deal with rather complex applications on a daily basis. And there, i have to deal with clumsy and rather annoying user interfaces than something innovative and productive to ease my life using them. So my ‘incentive’ to learn something new would be some mayor improvement, that makes the use of software (-ANY- software of course) much, much easier. I think the last major leap in software usability was the change from DOS to GUI based applications (btw. wasn’t this GEM 1.0…or am i wrong?). So i think i will stick with the old versions until i’m convinced that the change is worth while.

I hope i didn’t get too carried away and ,

A simple benchmark test recalculating 8000 trig functions 1000 times: 30% faster
VBA subs using built in VBA functions with no spreadsheet recalculation: no change
VBA subs with use of worksheetfunction calls: no change

This means that using worksheetfunction in VBA is still about 5 times slower than it was in 2000/2003 versions; disappointing.

These tests were with a Pentium Core2-duo running Vista.

I could oversimplify: the good bits of the Excel 2007 UI (this, the new sort dialog [compare against Gnumeric's]) show Microsoft stealing the better UI functionality from its competitors; the bad bits, e.g., the ribbon, are completely home grown.

Sadly, we got word last week that Office07 would be rolled out within the next few weeks. I will reluctantly switch over. Despite the fact that I’ve forced myself to use it at home for the past six months, I am not much better than on day one. I considered the “classic” menu addins, the problem is that any way you get to a lousy dialog, you still get a lousy dialog. I’ll probably buy one anyway, though, because my toolbar is very customized (it’s just the letters A-Z) and I have too many shortcuts and macros attached that I am too used to using to let go of. I doubt anyone outside of here would understand, but going from my custom Alt-N to an Alt-E-S-V to paste values would drive me endlessly nuts. I do that hundreds of times a day. I know 100 keystrokes vs 300 is nothing, but it feels like something. In fact, that is probably my chief complaint. ’07 probably is not much slower to use than before, but it feels like it is.

In general with SP1, I don’t expect any changes to the UI, particularly no changes to the dialogs, which I find especially frustrating. I don’t expect much improvement in speed or in charting, other than the minimal improvement to charting of “large” data sets (a few kpoints). I have no special knowledge of the SP1, despite having taken part in its beta: I could not really sense any difference. Then I had to rebuild the laptop that 2007 was installed on, and I did not reinstall the SP1 beta, and it still felt the same.

Sam