MS Office 2007 vs. MS Office 2003

Today I uninstalled Microsoft Office 2007 Home & Student trial version so that it neither runs nor is installed upon my new computer. I did this because ever since I got used to Microsoft Office 2003 Professional on my first computer, I felt like Microsoft had kind of arrived as far as the program doing what it was supposed to and managing to do lots of things for me without doing them only halfway and without doing a whole load of things that I never want. It doesn't try to be smarter than it really is, but it makes things easier than they were in previous versions.

Even so, I gave Office 2007 a try for ~three (3) weeks and I have not been favorably impressed. I don't know what is to be gained by doing away with the traditional menu bar, and the substitute seem to arbitrary for me. Maybe I would like it better if I took a class. But I don't want to take a class because that would require time and money.

I came home from my little trip to a portion of the east side of the Pacific Ocean, during which I had a fair amount of time to think because I didn't bring very many audio compact discs with me and because radio reception is not good way over there, and I thought to myself that I should make sure that Microsoft Office 2003 will function on top of the Windows Vista platform. So I did, and I also found out that there is a Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats. This pack is available for free download from Microsoft and allows said Microsoft Office programs of some previous versions of said programs to view, edit, and save their respective files using the file formats new to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.

I haven't tried it yet, but this download was the thing that convinced me to switch back to Microsoft Office 2003 Professional.