A random sampling of tweets about Office 2007 offers no surprises. Users are frustrated, desperate, confused, angry even. No matter where you are in your 2007 migration – research and planning stage; implementation; post-migration – you will hit some snags, to be sure. How you handle them may dictate future budget allocations, even the health of your IT department. Here’s what you should know before you choose a migration plan and partner:
Myth No. 1: You can make Office 2007 look and act like Office 2003.
“Two words: no menus. Two more: no toolbars.”
Scads of third-party applications have cropped up that promise to make Office 2007 look and act like 2003. Some are effective; most miss the point. Holding on to the old interface will only serve to diminish your Office 2007 migration return on investment.
Myth No. 2: Migration support needs disappear completely after a few weeks.
No, no, no. Microsoft designed the new interface to make it easier for users to find features that were available in older versions, but were buried in an elaborate menu structure. It’s working, too. Months into a rollout, your employees will be finding tools they never knew existed – and they will need help learning how to use them. To expect IT generalists to know how to use long-hidden features is downright unreasonable.
Myth No. 3: Migrating to Office 2007 is like every other migration.
Two words: no menus. Two more: no toolbars.
Many users will not even be able to open files without training and help. Office 2007 is a complete overhaul of the user interface. In previous upgrades, knowledge of how to get to features in the previous version got users where they wanted to go 95 percent of the time. With 2007, it’s zero percent.
Myth No. 4: Handling a migration without outside help will give my staff a chance to shine.
Don’t turn your IT staff into scapegoats. The scale of end-user need when Office 2007 hits a desktop guarantees your IT department will be overwhelmed.
Myth No. 5: I have smart employees. They’ll have no problem figuring out how to use Office 2007 on their own.
An employee does not call the general help desk when he can get the answer from a colleague who sits near him. If none of his colleagues know how to use Office 2007, and he calls a generalist at the help desk, how much expertise will he find there?
FIND MORE INFO IN: Office 2007 Migration Checklist + Tools | Migration Case Study | PC Helps eTraining |Desktop Application Support | Contact PC Helps
About Jenny Sweeney
I agree with all 5 myths and know there are tons more out there in regards to Office 2007 deployments. Not sure what IT departments are thinking when they roll out Office 2007 to employees with little warning and no support besides the Help Desk. My company deployed Office 2007 globally and it was pretty much a nightmare. Everyone spent probably a good week complaining to each other how they couldn’t get anything done because everything looked foreign and that just when they became ‘experts’ with their computers, they changed. Lucky for me my wife bought a home PC recently pre-installed with O2007, plus my daughter uses it in school, so I had some hands on experience with it and was able to get a least some of my normal work complete in the early days. It took me about 3 full weeks to get back to par. Good luck to anyone using Office 2007 without training!
It takes a few weeks to get acclamated to the ribbon. After that, I was way more productive with Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The changes in Access are not as good.
Thanks for the comments, John and Dave. I agree, especially about the ribbon taking some getting used to. When I installed Office 2007 on my computer, I was expecting mayhem thanks to the warnings I read all over the Web. Much to my surprise, though, the new interface grew on me. It’s also much more conducive to productivity. Change is good, I say.