Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Old Version

I would have rated this program 3.5 if that was a choice.As an experienced but semi-casual user I needed to upgrade from "Home & Student" "Non-Commercial" version to "Full" version in order to legally sell a program I've written.Installation was a REAL HASSEL !! Turns out one can't simply "uninstall" the Student version and install the Full version - as usual with Microsoft nothing is simple, however as the full version was recently purchased thus still under warranty, it didn't cost anything for the techs at MS to do the million things necessary to accomplish the un-new-install.Except for the "Non-Commercial" banner the versions appear identical. I will say the new "ribbion" way of accessing the functions takes a lot of getting accustomed to if one has a lot of experience with earlier versions such as '97.

Others not happy about this version of Excel saved me lots of typing. 100% agree. My reason for upgrading was the inherent memory limitations of Excel 2000, so my spreadsheets are pretty large.I find basic bugs and repeatedly have crashes. In Bangalore they will say anything to make you believe they have solved the problem, and seem to assume you are an absolute novice (but go about it in a nice-enough way). Their technical training does not impress me. They will for instance tell me how to restore files (causing loss of formatting etc.) after a crash when I call to report a crash. And then, "Do you agree that the issue has been resolved?"! The root causes for these crashes, I have to admit, is outside their scope. But the eagerness to close out their "workorders" rather than saying that this seems to be a bug and we will ensure that this is reported to the programmers "bugs me". For instance, I have worksheets where copy and paste behaves as if I am pasting fixed addresses, but have found that if I use Paste Special Formulas it will do what it is supposed to do. Calling Bangalore, I am told that if I start my cell with +1 then I can incrementally increase my cell values, so do we agree we can close this out? I know he understood the problem, as he told me he had the same happen on his machine. And here I was told that they will not copy anything from my machine!The menu is plain awful (but pretty to look at). You will do a lot of traveling with your mouse, that is for sure. You can fix this by customizing the Quick Access Toolbar by making your own menu. It is essentially a workaround to the regression of the program menu. Having used the software "continuously" for the last 6 weeks the logic behind the menu still escapes me,.... every day I wonder what this development team was thinking. In cooking a meal, everything you need should be in an area where it makes sense. Rather than having everything in drawers, cupboards and closets in the kitchen, this version of Excel places the wood for the stove where it logically would be found.... in the woodshed in the backyard. The utensils for cooking are placed with other tools..... but they are in the garage. The placemats for the table ..... are located in the linen closet upstairs. While there is some logic to this, it just is not practical!Once you start working with this 2007 version of Excel you will soon see some very familiar menus come up. However, there are menus where I have found that some of the functions do not work, or what used to come up as a complete (menu-) list now has to be scrolled after you find it.

I do data entry at work, a lot of it from spreadsheets. My laptop is about two years old and has 2 GB of memory. Ever since the forced upgrade from Excel 2003 (which I loved), my life has been significantly more miserable. It's apparently a memory thing, but routinely Excel 2007 will show fields as empty, despite their having values in them. I need to actually click in a blank field to see that it actually has data I should have entered in. One of these days I'm bound to miss entering something, because you know you actually expect to SEE the value displayed if it's there. Was there zero quality testing or did they just not care at all? I've looked around online, seems to be a relatively common event.When it work, Excel 2007 is pretty good. I don't like the ribbon instead of a toolbar, but I can get used to it. It can handle more than the 65K limit that older versions of Excel had. Formula creation is more advanced as is conditional formatting to allow for more options for you to use formats to highlight different data values on the fly.While it has some nice features, I absolutely cannot recommend this software when something as obscene as not displaying all the values is allowed in a shipped piece of software. They may be on the right track, but at best I'd say skip this and wait for the next version of Excel to come out. Maybe it'll be cleaned up by then. OpenOffice is another option, free and works about as well as Excel 2003 does. I just wish I had that option to use at work.Update------We just found a HUGE issue at work. If you're using the great filters and dealing with many, many lines...you know the two biggest reasons you'd use 2007 instead of 2003, it sometimes has a horrible bug. If you paste over filtered cells you will quite often paste that same content into all the hidden cells as well. We got BADLY burnt, I'm talking 10+ man hours lost, on data collection files when some people innocently pasted and it corrupted things filtered out. We also tried to fill right from a column, Excel 2007 said it was too complex and wouldn't work via a pop-up message, then proceeded to do it and overwrite all the hidden cells with values. Awful software, simply awful.

I agree with the other reviewers. Once you are used to the "old" versions of excel, have fun learning to use this one. You can still use the old keyboard short-cuts (such as Alt+I, R to insert a row). There are some new features that are nice, but who is going to use them or how often?? There is no 'File' menu now...It is the windows icon in the top left hand corner. It took me ten minutes just to figure out how to print or save a file....now it is second nature, but I have been using it for several months. Not for the not-so-computer-inclined person. Not very user friendly. AND, you have to remember to save files as 'xls' instead of 'xlsx' type so other people can open them...

a-ok

What can I say, it's Microsoft Excel and it works as expected. I received in a timely matter and have been using it as required by my work.

I have to say that by and large, Vista is better. Excel 2007 is absolutely horrible to me, though. I've used Excel XP a LOT, and am very familiar with it. The transparent interface and flexibility with its functions and Macros is unparalleled by anything this side of Matlab or Mathematica, plus you can do so many every-day things too.With Excel 2007, Microsoft seems to be trying to appeal to the stupid among the masses who are impressed with eye candy, and ease and simplicity of easy and simple tasks, so they've dumbed down the functionality and constrained many of their functions that were previously general and flexible so as to be only for one clearly defined product bullet point. For instance: in Excel XP you used to be able to use conditional formatting on almost anything such as making the text color grey if the value is equal to that of the cell above, now you can pretty much only use conditional formatting in limited ways on numbers alone. Almost any time I've tried to do anything with Excel 2007 beyond just data entry, it took at least 10 times longer than it would in XP, trying to figure out how to modify their designer's vision of what all spreadsheets should be like into what I want, or how to interpret their much to colloquially worded dialog boxes, ultimately having to resort to agonizing trial-and-error for something they should just state plainly. The most consistently annoying thing for me (and this is just one example of many similar things) is that the combination of Ctrl+Shift+Down (and Up) doesn't do a **** thing anymore - they haven't put it to use, not even on something I wouldn't but others would use, it just does absolutely nothing! Ctrl+Shift+Left and Ctrl+Shift+Right still work, but not Up or Down! (Ctrl+Shift+Down used to select every cell starting at the current cell and going down until it either encountered a blank cell or stopped encountering non-empty cells - similar controls exist in all Microsoft software) I would and could write a Macro to do this that runs off the Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down shortcut and it's really not too difficult, but then you can't undo afterword, as you can't with any Macros in Office products.Basically, if you have any significant geeky or right-brain leanings, or if you've grown very comfortable with past versions of Excel, you will almost certainly be frustrated with this and find yourself trying to get Pre-Vista Excel installed on your Vista computer. I sincerely hope this is not the future of Microsoft software.

The new ribbon design is supposed to make it easier to learn and use. It may be for some new users but for experienced users, it isn't. This version takes away some critical nuts & bolts customization features and many tasks now take longer to perform. This is not due to the learning curve, it is the inherent nature of the way the ribbon works. Once you are familiar with the program, nothing is faster than the old menu structure. If Microsoft added an option to allow users to choose between menus and ribbons, it would be the best of both worlds, satisfying the needs of both new and experienced users. The new version does not run macros as fast however. My recommedation for existing users: keep Office 2003 for as long as you can and consider going to Open Office when Microsoft no longer supports 2003 (unless they restore the functionality in a newer release of 2007).

For what I need it for, excellent. Gives me room for improvement as I increase my skills.

Good product and fast delivery