jdonalds

I've now been using the new ribbon interface in Word, Excel, and Power Point daily for about six weeks. I knew Office 2007 existed and has a new interface because it was installed on my wife's laptop but I was avoiding the pain of learning a new interface as long as I could. Finally I needed to use Power Point, which was not part of the Office package on my computer, so I did the upgrade. At first I began to appreciate some of the new interface features. Over time I've begun to see it is not much more than a repackaging of the same features. Finally I've decided the upgrade was a waste of Microsoft's time, and mine. For some reason Microsoft didn't seem to like long pull down menus. They never bothered me, and now after six weeks of daily use of the new ribbon I find I miss the old Edit, File, etc. There are a few things that seem to be better about the new interface but the pain I still go through every day trying to find where they hid an old familiar feature isn't fun. Even after I've learned many of the features I commonly use I just don't see the new interface as an improvement. The same goes for Vista only more so. I am quite happy with XP and will wait as long as I can to avoid Vista. Again my wife's laptop has Vista and I am her administrator. When she needs help I spend quite a long time trying to figure out where Microsoft put things, apparently just for the sake of moving things around. Vista is even worse than the new ribbon interface. I want an operating system that is just that. I don't want built in features like photo software or mp3 players. To me those are best handled by applications and shouldn't be part of the operating system. People speak highly about fast search and the ability to type in a few characters to find a program in Vista's start button. I long ago abandoned using the start button and use a toolbar to start my favorite applications so those new features mean nothing to me. I'm sorry my wife's computer has Vista installed and, had I known, I would not have purchased the laptop. I would have searched for an alternative. It irks me that someday XP will be obsolete and I'll be forced to make a dramatic change. A dramatic change would be to move to Vista, or Apple, or Ubuntu, or some other operating system. Vista will not be my first choice. Change, for the sake of change, is not appreciated here. I would not install Vista on my desktop if it were free. I've been experimenting with Ubuntu, and am waiting to hear more about the Google Operating System. I used to program in C++ on Unix so Ubunto looks interesting to me. I'm going to dump XP from my spare laptop and load it up with Ubuntu and see how things go. As long as I'm forced to make a dramatic operating system change I may opt for a free one! I've long been a PC guy, avoiding Apple. With the introduction of Vista and Office 2008 I will now take a long look at an Apple computer at my next purchase time. Apple sales are up. Some say because of the iPod and iPhone. I think Microsoft is doing more to sell Apple than Apple is. End of rant... Thank you for providing a forum for me to dump on. John