and getting rid of the stupid ribbons and stupid sidebars?

What is stupid in Office 2007 is using Excel for charting in Powerpoint instead of good old Chart app?

Why? I have spreadsheets that are huge and take ages to calculate, and I can only have one open at a time (even with multi-core CPUs, tonnes of RAM, Vista x64, etc.); so when I try and draw a chart in PP it create a new Excel sheet and locks my computer, which then works at a snails pace whilst I paste a table of numbers in.

Charting does not need Excel functionality in it's worksheet view, it just needs to accept numbers and plot them.

If web apps are going to pwn the lower end of the spreadsheet market, perhaps Microsoft have no choice but to support the high end "power users"? I would like to think so ... therefore I would like better memory management, more multi-core support (2007 doesn't do all functions), more 'professional' chart options, better stats functions and support, etc.

I hope to hell they sort out its interface, because the current 2007 interface does nothing but encourage people to move away from office, even if your coming from office 2003.

Much like Vista, some bits are nice and make sence, other fail. The main fail of office 2007 for me is completely breaking the users mapping. This combined with an undeveloped help system makes the transition very painful.

I know when I was last playing around with it, none of our service providers has office 2007 as a requirement (unlike 2003) for intergration into there products, and had no imediate plans to introduce it (there just was not demand).

Paris, because its a nice city.

God, I hate to defend MS, as I have been a penguaphile for best part of a decade, but please stop bitching about Office 2007's UI.

Once you get used to it you start to wonder what the hell was going on with earlier versions of Office... 2007 has a far more intuitive interface and is much prettier (for what that's worth).

<shudder> I really need to take a shower now....

I'll give you that its more pretty, but I'll deny its more intuitive till my dying breath (especially Access 2007).

I couldn't agree more! The UI for Office 2007 is excellent. Autodesk have used the same idea in AutoCAD, and it too is brilliant. It's a far more intuitive interface. The majority 'softies seem to fear change, which has always confused me as they also seem to be feature-tards. Ridiculous. You never know, Office for Windows may even catch up with Office for Mac ('softies, noticed the way that I typed 'Mac'? MAC means Media Access Control as in MAC address or it's a cosmetics company...)!

You know, Open document Format

ODT: Text docs

ODS: spreadsheets

ODP: Presentations

???