2007 or 2k

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lamb Chop
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Lamb Chop

I am going to buy a laptop next month. I would like to get vista business
64bit. I am thinking whether I should use my old office2k or buy the latest
office07.

I use word mainly for editing my thesis which has a lot of equations and
figures. The documents are usually fair large with a lot of graphics and
thousands equations.

excel for basic calculation and sometime drawing some graphs but I mainly
use sigma plot, a scientific grapher.

Access for keeping up the basic data base.

Powerpoint, only occasionally. Once in every half year.



========
Any comments on comparing office2k and 07 would be appreciate. Will
office07 run better in a 64bit environment?

Thanks
 
Lamb said:
I am going to buy a laptop next month. I would like to get vista
business 64bit. I am thinking whether I should use my old office2k
or buy the latest office07.

I use word mainly for editing my thesis which has a lot of equations
and figures. The documents are usually fair large with a lot of
graphics and thousands equations.

excel for basic calculation and sometime drawing some graphs but I
mainly use sigma plot, a scientific grapher.

Access for keeping up the basic data base.

Powerpoint, only occasionally. Once in every half year.



========
Any comments on comparing office2k and 07 would be appreciate. Will
office07 run better in a 64bit environment?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Bearing in mind that this is only my opinion, and that I haven't tried
running anything on a 64-bit system yet...

I think you're a prime candidate to stay with the older version of Office
for a while. When you're in the middle of writing a thesis, the last thing
you need is to spend a couple of months figuring out where everything went
in the new user interface. This isn't a matter of speed or great new
features, it's a matter of reprogramming your brain and your fingers. After
your thesis is complete, you can get Office 2007 and spend all the time you
like on it.

Word 2007 has a new equation editor (although the old one is still there and
still works the same as before). It has the big advantage that the new
variety of equation is in some sense "ordinary text" that's just displayed
differently, while the old variety is an "object" that has to be interpreted
by an external DLL. When you put in hundreds, let alone thousands, of the
old-style equations in a single document, Word could become sluggish or
unstable. That shouldn't happen with the new variety. If you already have a
lot of equations, though, Word doesn't have any way to convert them to the
new variety -- they would remain as objects unless you manually retype them.

Another consideration: Office 2007 is only a couple of months past general
release, a period some people call "gamma test". :-) There will be a period
for at least a few more months while people install it in configurations
that were never seen in the beta test or in Microsoft's very extensive
internal testing, and find more latent bugs. Unless you're adventurous, let
others find them and wait for the first Service Pack.

Both the old Office and Office 2007 are 32-bit programs. All else being
equal, running them in a 64-bit OS on a 64-bit processor won't speed them
up. Indeed, it could make them slower, because every instruction has to be
converted from 32 bits to 64 bits and every result has to be converted back
to 32 bits (a process called "thunking"). On a new PC, particularly if it's
a high-speed dual-core processor, you probably wouldn't notice that penalty.
But there's no big advantage in 64-bit operation for Office, only for
programs that are compiled for 64 bit use.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
With little software around to take advantage of either 64-bit or
dual/quad-core processing, I'd recommend staying with your Office 2000 under
32-bit Vista for a while. Maybe in a couple of years time it will look
totally different, but unless you have some application that needs (and
supports) 64-bit and needs powerful processing on a multi-thread platform, I
think it is a little too early to take that route. It isn't just needing the
apps that support multi-thread and 64-bit, but you may find some hardware
drivers difficult to find.

Wait for more 64-bit support and DirectX 10 to come along.
 
My own experience and view entirely. I have found Office 2000, with all
service packs, to be entirely stable and reliable. Posts here suggest that
all subsequent versions of Word (anyway) are not. I personally would not
risk any later version of Word. And, for the record I wouldn't trust Vista
either.
 
Absolutely agree. One more thing to add. There are many instances where a
service pack is later found to be *itself* a disaster so I wouldn't even
rely on that until a good few years have gone by! Maybe to the Omega test
stage!
 
Hi Aalaan,

I think "many instances" exaggerates a bit. Between Windows and Office
updates, I can only recall one or two over the last 5 years that caused
problems on the scale of "disaster".

In the end, it always depends on a balance of risk and reward, and on your
personal risk tolerance. If an upgrade or a service pack offers enough
fixes, the risk for most people is small enough to make it worth at least
trying. If one is extremely risk-averse -- which sounds like it might be
your category -- then there's no reward that's worth any risk, and they'll
have to pry your obsolete software out of your cold dead hand. :-)

Fortunately, Microsoft has also gotten much better in recent versions about
making it possible to uninstall service packs and other updates. If it makes
something on your system stop working, you can remove it. I don't remember
well, but I think that's another thing you can't do with Office 2000.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
Hi Jay

If I'm just at the end of editing an 82,000 word manuscript and have 15
minutes 'til the deadline, stopping to unravel some service pack problem is
a disaster. I must have absolute reliability from a product. The trouble
with software is that we all sometimes get involved in it for its own sake
and we are all happy to experiment and chat about it. Me too at the mo
because I haven't got that sort of deadline on right now. But when I do
(which is often) I need a product that'll just work 100% of the time and not
trip me up. So there are two planes to this. I may well have the time to
investigate new software when not under pressure. But on the user plane I
certainly do not.
 
I never used 2000, but I have found 2003 about as stable as anyone could ask
for. About the only thing that will crash it is mucking about with a doc
imported from WordPerfect. <g>

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
If Lamb Chop were just starting their thesis, on the other hand, I would
recommend Word 2007 without hesitation. With lots of equations and figures,
a standard .doc format document is a corrupted document just waiting to
happen. In my year or so using the new .docx format (since early beta), I've
found it to be a lot more robust and a lot less corruption resistant than
the .doc format. I also find that .docx documents scroll and page a lot
faster than .doc format documents.

Depending on what kind of figures Lambchop means, the new graphics
capabilities in Office 2007 can produce some really sophisticated graphs &
charts, too. Those capabilities might ultimately mean that it takes less
time to prepare those aspects and getting them to look right.

Depending on how reference heavy the thesis is, the citation/bibliography
feature *might* be useful, but I find that it's more useful for lightweight
research papers than for heavy-duty academic papers.

Yes, Word 2007 is new. But, I use both it and Word 2003 daily, and I have
many fewer problems with Word 2007. More than once, I've actually been able
to repair documents that were hopeless broken in Word 2003 by using Word
2007's Open and Repair command. I would have expected it to be basically the
same as Word 2003's Open and Repair, but since my success rate is higher in
2007, I have to believe that it's been tweaked.

OTOH... if you're heavily invested in AutoText entries and rely on the
AutoComplete feature, Word 2007 might well be your worst nightmare.
 
I have used 2000, but 2003 is more stable and more graceful in recovery -
however, as with all software, it is not without issues - the most
irritating of which is in its random changing of settings stored in the
registry - that appear under tools > options, but it can be bullied into
complying with auto macros. The changes to mail merge take some getting used
to also, but instability is not an issue.

--
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>
Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>
 
Hi Aalaan,

On the other hand, when you're just at the end of a manuscript, you may be at the point where you find out that you just hit the
problem that requires the service pack you didn't install to resolve the problem. There isn't any software with 'absolute'
reliability, or 'Murphy' would be retired <g>.

===========
Hi Jay

If I'm just at the end of editing an 82,000 word manuscript and have 15
minutes 'til the deadline, stopping to unravel some service pack problem is
a disaster. I must have absolute reliability from a product. The trouble
with software is that we all sometimes get involved in it for its own sake
and we are all happy to experiment and chat about it. Me too at the mo
because I haven't got that sort of deadline on right now. But when I do
(which is often) I need a product that'll just work 100% of the time and not
trip me up. So there are two planes to this. I may well have the time to
investigate new software when not under pressure. But on the user plane I
certainly do not. >>
--

Bob Buckland ?:-)
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*
 
Yes, agreed. But what I'm saying is that I use Word 2000 *with all its
service packs installed* (thanks to Jay) and it has always proved rock solid
for me. Whereas a bit of time on here shows innumerable problems with the
other versions *and* with some of the service packs some poor blighters have
put their faith in.
 
XP already has the 64bit version for some time. I thought office07 have
64bit version too. Especially if 64 bit computer hardware and software
will be certainly dominate the next one or two years market. That is why I
consider to get vista64+office07. From the disccusion you guys have, I
think it is better to stick on office2k for a while.

Thanks for everybody.
 
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