What Office Version should we standardize on?

Our IT guy indicated to me that we were finally looking at upgrading all our users to 2007. My guess is we are currently at 30% on 2007, with most of the rest on 2003, and a few on older versions. There's maybe 100 desktops, with only 20 or so heavier users who will occasionally create their own files. I'm guessing that most heavier users are now on 2007. Let's say the time frame would be September for upgrading. As it is, we mostly have been giving users Office 2007 as part of hardware replacements.

I mentioned that we should maybe just jump to 2010 if we are going to start upgrading everyone. The IT guy wasn't that open to the idea, but we get along well and I have some influence on these matters. Any thoughts?

I've personally been running 2007 for a year, and am getting along very well with it. I have spent about 10 minutes with Excel 2010 and don't see anything in the user interface that would cause problems. My thought is that if we catch the new version now, we will get five years on the same version and won't have to worry that in a couple years we'll be running mixed versions all over again.

One goal I have is better web page creation from Excel and Access for sharing information. I'm assuming Office 2010 has additional features in that area.

Omar

Office 2010 released to manufacturing last week, so you would expect it to hit the shelves in a couple of months after that. Office 2007 was definitely a product launched before it's time although I get on with it fine and have done for over two years now.

The way I see 2010 is 2007 fixed! The analogy is very similar to that we had with Excel 97 and 2000. 97 broke new ground and a lot of things with it, 2000 was probably one of the most stable releases of excel ever.

You do not gain huge amounts of new functionality in 2010, web slices, sparklines, etc but customising the ribbon easily is one that everyone complained about in 2007 is now fixed.

Whatever I would say your IT guy should look at getting everyone on the same version as inevitably there are features which will not play well together if you have mixed versions and as you are only about 20% into a roll-out, it may as well be 2010.

Considering other parts of the Office suite it also means pretty much standardisation of the ribbon across the suite which was not the case with 2007 and Outlook is still adding some pretty nice features to it's armory.

Thanks Nick. You confirmed what I was thinking. The Excel feature changes for 2010 don't excite me yet, but I haven't explored them. The one area of 2007 where I've had trouble is some occasional problems with MSQuery and the new table formats. I'm hoping 2010 has some of that solved.

One thing I'm expecting is the internet support for 2007 will evaporate quickly. I expect the bleeding edge will move to 2010 and want to forget about 2007.

I hadn't thought about Outlook. That part would be almost as important for us to get standardized on. I'm finding it harder to remember how to do odd things in the older versions.

Omar

Certainly improvements have been made in tables and the table formulas which were nigh on impossible to decipher have had their structure changed so they are far shorter and simpler.

MSQuery I would be sure hasn't changed and being ODBC would suspect never will, but in 2007 the whole data connection and amendment model with OLEDB was far better IMHO ;-)

Well, we had a discussion yesterday. Our CFO, myself, and the IT consultant. The plan is to roll everyone forward to 2007 fairly quickly. Then, as we upgrade hardware, we will bring in 2010. So we will still be a mixed version company, but at least it will be modern set of versions. I'll be able to use IFERROR for spreadsheets intended for common use, if nothing else.

Hi,

Office 2007 should be considered as the standard, as the Office 2010 is just released and they are still some bugs, I mean to say that it is not fully developed. Still it is under construction. Offcourse the finall version is released but though it contains some bugs, which will be modified soon. Wait for some period to consider Office 2010 as standard.