I've actually tried Office 2007 on a couple of occasions in recent years. On both occasions I lasted the first time I ever tried to do anything more than the most simple actions in Word or Excel before moving back to 2003. Even 5 years after the dreaded Ribbon Interface made its appearance I still cannot fathom what some crank at Microsoft was smoking when he decided that this was the way forward.i use office 2010 at work and we are starting to roll it out globally, upgrating office 2003. it's a nightmare. people who are 'data managers', and it literate have no problem with it. the old timers, the typist type people really struggle and despite the notion that the 'ribbon' was supposed to the functionality of the application more visible, it actually makes some things very difficult to find with users having to find themselves remembering what 100s of little icons do. i think icons are better than words when you have a small number of functions, but with something like office it's crazy.
At my work the plebs like me who merely manage stores still have Office 2003 on our office computers. The area managers have Office 2010 on their laptops. The other day my area manager was sitting next to me and asked for my help in Excel (for I am the IT geek). I couldn't help her. No amount of playing around with daft oversized icons could uncover what I was trying to find when it was so simple to locate in a menu in Excel 2003. Yet I don't doubt the functionality was in Excel 2010 for a second, it's just become such a mess to navigate and use. I am dreading the (sadly inevitable) day when Office 2003 is going to be taken away from me at work, my productivity will only plummet.
Same with us. The company pays a fortune out on office licences when OpenOffice would happily accomplish most of what we do. But we have so many criticial reports and programs which utilise office files using vba, macros, and office-specific hacks that it would be a gargantuan task to change.if it wasn't for the fact that so many critical business processes are powered by vba and macros, i'm sure we would have moved over to libreoffice ages ago. i much perfer the interface. personally though, i find myself using google docs more now.