Microsoft Office
E. Service Pack Two for Office 2007
G. Microsoft Office 2007 File Formats
H. The Three Most Important Office Programs
A. Microsoft Office
For all of our projects, we make extensive use of Microsoft Office 2007; we do not use previous versions of Office. Office 2007 has a new ribbon interface (called Microsoft Office Fluent) that is amazing and the new file formats are a significant advantage. In addition, Office 2007 has new collaboration features that allow teams to work together more effectively. Thus, you will need to install Office 2007 or Office 2010 if you want to work with us. As we note in Section K, we recommend that rather than purchasing Office 2007, you should install the free beta version of Office 2010 and then purchase 2010 when it is released in June 2010.
B. Office 2007 Editions
There are a ridiculous number of editions of Office 2007, which make things very confusing. The following editions include Microsoft Access 2007 and Microsoft Outlook 2007, the two programs you will need most if you are working with us:
- Professional
- Professional Plus
- Ultimate
- Enterprise
Thus, you need to acquire (or already have) one of these editions, or you could purchase the necessary programs separately (this latter approach is not recommended). Wikipedia has a good explanation of the differences between the various editions, as does Microsoft.
C. Evaluation Copy
You can download a 60 day trial copy of Office 2007 Professional Edition. After 60 days, you have to pay for it if you want to continue using Office 2007. The Professional edition includes Microsoft Access. As we note in Section K, you can currently download the beta version of Office 2010, which we recommend over Office 2007.
D. Student Edition
If you have an .edu e-mail address, you can purchase a copy of Ultimate Edition of Office 2007 for $60. This option is also available to some students who do not have .edu addresses. Note that some universities give out .edu addresses to alumni (my Harvard .edu address is jamesmitchell@post.harvard.edu, although I never use it), so even if you are not a student, you might be able to obtain the Ultimate edition for $60. Ultimate is, as you might think, the ultimate version of Office in that it includes everything under the sun. (Actually, some would argue the Enterprise edition includes more, but that edition is available only if you have a corporate purchasing relationship with Microsoft.)
E. Service Pack Two for Office 2007
After you install Office 2007, make certain you have Service Pack Two installed. Here’s how to tell which service pack you have:
- Click the Office button in the top left corner.
- Click on options at the bottom of the screen.
- Click on Resources.
- Click on the “About” button.
- If Service Pack One is installed, it will say “SP1.” If Service Pack Two is installed, it will say “SP2.” If SP1 or SP2 are not listed, then no service pack has been installed.
You should install Service Pack Two if either one of the following is true:
- No service pack has been installed.
- If you have installed only Service Pack One.
Pack Two is inclusive of One, so you do not need to install One.
You can download Service Pack Two here.
F. Training Programs
If you are unfamiliar with Office 2007, you should run Microsoft’s free self-paced training programs.
G. Microsoft Office 2007 File Formats
Office 2007 uses a more advanced file format that is XML-based, which they call Office Open XML. This means the likelihood of corruption is much less than for the previous binary formats, and if there is corruption, there will in most cases be third party solutions which can recover the file. If you want to read about these new file formats, see Microsoft’s explanation. Wikipedia has a more technical explanation.
Office 2010 uses the same file formats as Office 2003.
Microsoft publishes a compatibility pack for Office 2003 that allows Office 2003 to read and write 2007 file formats. If you will be working with us, in most cases you should not and cannot use Office 2003, as there are substantial incompatibilities between the two versions that will make document exchange difficult.
Joel Spolksy has written a good explanation for why the Office formats are so complicated. (In his essay, he is discussing Office 2003, but the same applies to Office 2007). There are some who criticize Microsoft’s XML-based file formats, most notably Stephane Rodriguez, who has an entire blog criticizing them. She is a bit crazy but if you are interested in the gory details, her blog is worth reading.
H. The Three Most Important Office Programs
There are three Office programs we use extensively:
- Microsoft Outlook — All of us access the same Exchange Server (“ES”) mailbox. For you to access it, you need to have Outlook 2007 installed. Microsoft Entourage (the e-mail software package Microsoft sells for the Mac), for example, is notorious for not connecting well to ES.
- Microsoft Access — Our data are stored in various Microsoft SQL Server databases, so that we can all access the same data at the same time. Forms, queries and reports are written in Microsoft Access. You will need Access 2007 to access our databases.
- Microsoft Word — We are very advanced users of Word.
I. Books
We recommend the following books for Office 2007:
- Special Edition Using Microsoft Office Word 2007
- Microsoft Office Access 2007 Forms, Reports and Queries — If you will not be designing databases but rather just creating queries and reports, this is a good book to purchase
- Special Edition Using Microsoft Office Access 2007 — This is a more comprehensive book on Access, which we recommend if you will be doing more than just designing forms, queries and reports.
- Special Edition Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 — You probably will not need a book on Outlook, but if you want one, we recommend this one.
If you are using Microsoft Excel, look for books written by John Walkenbach:
- Microsoft Office Excel 2007
- Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Formulas
- Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Power Programming with VBA
If you choose Office 2010 rather than 2007, look for equivalent books on Amazon.com.
If you purchase books through Amazon.com, look for “New and Used.” In most cases, there is a third party reseller who has an almost new copy of these books for a much lower price.
J. Apple Macintosh Users
The current version of Office for the Mac is called Office 2008 for Mac, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage. Entourage is somewhat similar to Outlook, but is not as powerful and unlike Outlook, it does not do a good job of connecting to Exchange Server. Office 2008 for Mac does not include Access or Outlook. If you need Access or Outlook, you will either have to:
- get a PC or
- install a program that allows you to run Windows simultaneously (as opposed to having to boot into OS X or Windows).
In general, if you are a business user that works in teams or groups, using a Macintosh is a pretty dumb thing to do. Although it not a bad client operating system (ignoring the fact that the choice of software packages on Windows is about three orders of magnitude greater), if you are working on a team, you have to think about the server, and Macintosh has little to offer on the server side, while Microsoft has the most comprehensive set of business solutions for the server in the marketplace.
We have written a page for Macintosh users, which you should read if you own a Mac.
K. Microsoft Office 2010
The next version of Office is Office 2010, which will be released in 1Q2010. Some call it Office 14, because internally it is the 14th version of Office. (Office 2007 is version 12. Version 13 was skipped due to marketing reasons.) Here are some reviews of Office 2010:
Microsoft has a free beta version of Office 2010. Instead of purchasing and installing Office 2007, we recommend that you download the free Office 2010 beta and then purchase Office 2010 when it is released in June, 2010.
L. Other Office Suites
On rare occasions (thankfully very rare) we meet people who are using other productivity office suites. If we are going to work together, we almost certainly will be exchanging lots of files. If we are both going to be editing these files (as opposed to a one way transfer from A to B), then you need to have Office 2007.
- Conversions never work perfectly, particularly given our advanced, push-Office-to-its-limits usage of Office. We have better things to do with our lives than to spend time fixing imperfect conversions caused by the fact that you have decided not to use the productivity package used by more than 95 percent of the knowledge workers in the U.S.
- Office has numerous features that the other packages do not. We use those features, our daily work flow depends on them being available. The other packages are typically at a level of sophistication that Office was at more than a decade ago. We are not interested in going backwards ten years in time. Why do you want to go back ten years?
- We are among the most advanced users of Office in the world, and we have figured out ways to save a considerable amount of time and energy using the more advanced features of Office. In the process of working together, you will have an opportunity to learn these techniques.
Some of the other office productivity suites/software packages are:
- WordPerfect — Some lawyers, particularly in California, use WordPerfect because it does a better job of printing the vertical lines and numbers that California courts require.
- OpenOffice is probably the best of the free software productivity suites, but it will be a long time, if ever, before it is as advanced as Office 2007. Their word processor is not bad, their spreadsheet is not very good, and their database management system is a joke.
- Some Mac owners use Apple Pages. We have learned the hard way that Pages is not capable of a decent conversion from Word format to Pages format.
- Google Docs — Google offers a basic set of productivity packages called Google Docs. Its primary claim to fame is that it runs run on the server and thus you do not need to install software on your computer. Some liken Google Docs to the first version of Office, but we think that comparison is unfair, not to Google Docs but to Office, since the first version of, say, Word had features that Google Docs does not have. Google Docs is not a serious tool. It does have one interesting advantage: it is great for on-line collaboration — e.g., if two people are writing the same document at once.
Life is too short to spend time on imperfect conversions and productivity suites that are not best in class. If you’re not willing to install Office 2007 or 2010, realistically we are the wrong firm for you.
