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.
Apple released Mac OS X 10.5, code named “Leopard” this week. Leopard represents a noticeable but not compelling upgrade from Tiger; there are a few nice new user features, but the underlying operating system is not fundamentally changed. Most users won’t notice a huge difference in the way the system works.
Unfortunately, there are some compatibility issues with Leopard which could be fairly significant, at least at first. The most significant issue for the campus is that Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), the software which powers UC Backup, is incompatible with Leopard. IBM is planning to release an updated version in the first quarter of 2008–it looks like Leopard users will be without campus backup for several months at least.
FileMaker also has some problems with Leopard; FileMaker Inc. announced a free update to FileMaker 9 which fixes the problems, but has also said that it will not certify or update previous versions of FileMaker. Most campus FileMaker users are using versions earlier than 9, so this will likely be a problem if you can’t upgrade to FileMaker 9 right now. (See my post from July 27 on the need to migrate to a modern version of FileMaker).
Several Adobe applications, including Acrobat Professional which is in use by many departments, also have problems with Leopard. The MacOS Rumors site has a list of reported compatibility issues.
Because of these problems, especially the problem with TSM, at this time we are recommending that users not buy upgrades to Leopard. and if possible, buy new computers with Tiger installed instead of Leopard. If you have Leopard, contact your computing support team to see if we can work around the problems.
Leopard should be a good operating system, but it will take some time for all these applications to catch up with it.
