Office 2007

I’ve been looking at the various versions of Microsoft’s Office 2007, trying to decide whether I can really justify an upgrade. I use Office 2003 Professional at the moment, but to upgrade to the 2007 equivalent would set me back a whopping 280 quid or 420 euros. And then I have three machines to upgrade. Frankly, that’s horrendous.

 

But then I noticed something interesting about the Office 2007 Home and Student version. If you read the fine print of the license, it can be installed on up to three PCs (or licensed devices, as Microsoft’s lawyers want to call them). That then becomes about 100 quid or 150 euros to give a basic set of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote on the three machines. That, I think, can be justified.

 

It’s interesting that this ability to install on up to three devices in the home doesn’t seem to be much trumpeted about – I couldn’t find any mention of it on the main Microsoft pages for the Home and Student version.

 

OK, I don’t get Outlook 2007 in this version (Microsoft for some reason have substituted OneNote in its place), but I only use that on one machine, and I can soldier on with Outlook 2003 quite happily – I don’t think that Outlook 2007 is frankly much of an advance, certainly in my non-Exchange environment.

 

If I subsequently move across to Windows Vista on that machine, then I can consider moving from Outlook 2003 with the Windows Mail and Windows Calendar applications that come with Vista. Although I’ve already discovered that Microsoft doesn’t make it easy to do that. There are no import and export functions covering that scenario. I will have to transfer all my contact information one by one – and even then the fields in Vista’s Contact Manager are not fully compatible with Outlook contacts, so I’ll have to re-create some information. It’s a similar story for the Outlook Calendar entries – I have to move them across one by one. Update: I found out how to do this; but the Contacts export still eludes me. Yet more evidence, if any was needed, that Microsoft product groups live in their own little worlds.