Re: 2007 or 2k
- From: "Aalaan" <veryinvalid@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 06:37:21 +1000
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.
"Jay Freedman" <jay.freedman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:eQpLYO%23bHHA.4832@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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 FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup
so all may benefit.
Aalaan wrote:
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!
"Jay Freedman" <jay.freedman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ORLjq56bHHA.4872@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Lamb Chop wrote:
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
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 FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.
.
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