I would think that, by now, new versions of MS Office would get easier to use. It's hard to think of how much more functionality they could possibly push into the tools that they offer.
However, my experiences with MS Office 2007 have been FRUSTRATING and changes don't make sense to me.
The new ribbon, what the hell? The categories and where they've placed different functionality on those ribbons is NOT intuitive. I usually have to look through multiple ribbons before I find what I want, sometimes not finding it at all. I don't know how many times I've resorted to searching on Google to find out how to do something, or that something isn't supported with Office 2007.
Updateable field codes in Word 2007 for things like "Page 4 of 8" in footers, and inserting document titles, or the last saved date, or the last saved by information, is a great idea. And they do appear to have this functionality available. But it doesn't work like it should.
I can't figure out how to have a document update those fields automatically when you save it, or open it. You have to either go to "print preview", or right click on each field individually and choose "update field", or hit Ctrl-A to select all and then hit F9. WTF?
How come I can't apply a document template to an existing document?
When you set-up your headers and footers to be different for the first page than for the rest, how do you actually edit the headers and footers for page 2+ if you don't have content that spans to the 2nd page yet? Is the official way really just to hit "enter" enough times to create a new page, and then edit it? That's unacceptable.
Why can't I edit a read-only document, even if I don't plan on saving it? Maybe I want to just put a note in there, or move something around just to see how it looks, but not save it, because it's not checked-out to me yet from a SharePoint 2007 document library? (SharePoint is an entire other list of frustrations of the way things SHOULD be.)
Here's a link to a blog with many Word 2007 shortcomings, and oftentimes helpful work arounds that may not be obvious.
http://word2007bible.herbtyson.com/category/computing/word-2007/
Here's a blog detailing the how and why of the ribbon.
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/
