Office 14: Not happening in 2009

Fine by me. They need to get it right.

I'll just be happy when I stop hearing crap like... User: I don't like Vista! Me: Why is that? User: Because Vista Word 2007 crashes all the time! Me: Oh. Got it. The biggest mistake with Office 2007 was probably releasing it so closely to Vista -- users think they're the same thing!

At work I live in Outlook, Word, Excel, RDP, AD tools and Virtual Infrastructure client. We dont use Vista, so I am on XP. I am in and out of those tools all day long, opening tons of spreadsheets to dump data into, look stuff information in team spreadsheets, information on thousands of servers, cable assignment spreadsheets from the Network group, LUN mappings from the SAN team etc. We of course have an Enterprise agreement, so we own both Office 2003 and 2007. The current corporate build still comes with 2003. We in IT are able to use whatever since we support our own boxes. Most of us moved to 2007 when it was finally allowed at work, post SP1. With 60 days all but a very few went back because its just to slow. Mind you my corporate notebook is XP, on a Lenovo T61 with 2gigs of RAM. Office 2007 worked fine, was usable, but was slower by a good margin. Maybe its the way I use, in and out pretty quick opening many documents at one time. First thing in the morning opening Outlook after booting up, then getting a spread sheet emailed to me just so I could pluck a few rows out of it to copy and paste it someplace else was just painfully slow. I would say I am not power user, but a heavy user. There are some really nice 3D features if you use powerpoint, but for me and many at my work 2007 offered nothing much in terms of new features and lots of bloat/slow down. Scrolling through a large document it painful. Throw is the "Where the frak did they put this or that" new UI, couple with the default format being changed and causing problems for people receiving documents from me that were on 2003 with out the compatibility update was enough to go back willingly.

Add in new hardware and Office 2003 feels that much faster.

Office 2003 with BCM on XP is hideously slow compared to Office 2007 with BCM on Vista on the same hardware - a 2GB 1.6GHz Core Duo notebook that I had for a time after the January 2007 Action Pack update that included Vista and Office 2007.