Free Office 2007 training demo
Per Kathleen Valerio’s message, CalPACT and LearnIT are offering free 90-minute demos of Microsoft Office 2007, on March 24, 25 and 26. (Sign up through the UCB Learning Center on blu).
Office 2007 for Windows, and Office 2008 for the Mac, have interface changes which most users will find disconcerting. I recently moved to Office 2008 myself, and it took me a bit of poking around to figure out how to return the environment to something I could reasonably work in. (For a start, close the toolbox, enable the Formatting toolbar, and view in Normal or Draft mode).
The new Office also has a completely revised file format–you’ve probably already received “docx” or “xlsx” files which need to be converted to be read on older versions of Office. The new file formats are actually a lot better–they are XML-based, which means they’re simpler, more extensible, and should be less prone to corruption. But, the change will definitely cause problems for collaborators.
Those who use Word or Excel regularly will probably find it useful to attend one of these sessions.
One other benefit of the new XML-based file formats is that the files are much smaller.
Office 2007 and 2008 can easily be configured to save files in the older formats by default, and free converter programs are available for older versions of Office to open the new file formats.
See http://ls.berkeley.edu/lscr/news/2008-11-03-faculty-support-update for some more information on Office 2007 and 2008.
Comment by Seth — March 12, 2009 @ 2:02 pm
Thanks for the pointer, Seth.
Our recommendation at this point is for 2007/2008 users to save files in the old format for now, because the compatibility is really one-way; Office 2007/2008 can open the older format natively, but the older versions have to convert the 2007/2008 format to the old format before they can work with it. That won’t work well for people sharing documents on servers or through email.
Comment by Tom Holub — March 12, 2009 @ 2:18 pm