Being a consultant, I recently went to a big government agency which, about a year ago, migrated its hundreds of users to Vista and Office-2007.

That was my first encounter with Word 2007 and it litterally threw me on the floor !

I have been using Word since the its DOS character-based version-4 and always welcomed the improvements, that is until the 2007 release ! For Microsoft I am in the negligible fringe group of power users who do not count.

I think that this "fluent user interface" as Microsoft initially labeled it is just a big window-dressing designed to lure the naïve newcomer.

Anyways, initially I kept my thoughts to myself; then I began to ask questions around. The typical remarks were to the effect that it was not so bad and that maybe I had a problem to adapt (after all, I am a soon-to-retire baby-boomer!). Digging further on, people began to confess that after a year there were still things that they could not figure out and just gave up.

I finally discovered that there was a means to access the old Office-2002 tool suite through a virtual machine in Citrix. So whenever I am in a hurry to do the right thing fast, I go to Word 2002 available that way. After a few months of trial and error with 2007 I finally arrived to a stage where I can to the same things that I used to do but never as fast. Now other poeple at this agency are quietly using the Citrix backdoor.

Personnally the worst initial frustration at was the setup of the header styles with hierarchical numbering (I finally figured it out !).

I am a strong advocate of using paragraph formatting exclusively with styles for keeping consistency in long documents. To me it seems that Microsoft encourages its users to litterally "paint" thier documents without promoting the intelligent usage of styles; for structured and consistant presentation in documents I perfectly understand the temptation to use LateX instead.