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Over the weekend I installed Linux on my friend's old computer. Since she's a Linux newb, and since Linspire recently went free as in Freespire and free CNR, I decided to try out the distro of newbs.

Overall impression of Freespire: Disappointing. I'm not one of those Linux purists who thinks Linspire is all wrong, that mixing proprietary things into Linux is sinful and we need to keep the newbs at bay. I actually respect Linspire for its efforts at making Linux more mainstream. But I'm not impressed with Freespire. It's pretty, but a distro needs more than prettyness, even with newbies. CNR, their click-n-run warehouse that's supposed to be the easiest way to install programs ever, is just a bloated, confusing piece of shit. My friend couldn't figure it out at all, and even I had difficulty navigating its convaluted interface. And it kept crashing, because it used too much memory because it's a bloated piece of shit. Freepire also had a number of other problems on my friends computer. It wouldn't detect her cd drive or usb(even mount didn't work), flash was stuttery, her favorite game (Puzzle Pirates) wouldn't run, and things kept crashing. I went over to the Freespire forums and discovered that other people had simular problems. Unfortunetly, none of the threads had solutions. They had plenty of responses, but all of them were just people saying they had the same problem. Well, that's depressing. So I futzered around with that for a little bit, and then impatient me decided to check out the new Mepis.

I liked Mepis 3.4, and recommended it to people in the past, but I hadn't tried Mepis 6 yet. It turned out to be absolutely perfect for my friend. It recognized all her hardware, Flash worked, her game worked, and no crashes. Synaptic was a little confusing for her, but she liked it better than the gigantic, memory-eating maze that is CNR. It took little effort to get her computer set up to do everything she needs it to do, which after Freespire, was quite a relief. I'm surprised Mepis isn't more well known, it's certainly a great distro.

"Elley, I can't attach this file to my email. Can you help me?" the call comes over the cubicle wall.

We went over this yesterday. And the day before. "Sure!" I'm getting paid to be here, so I'll pretend to be cheerful.

He clicks on My Documents to show me the document he wants to send. Then he goes to Outlook and clicks insert file. His documents show up. "Where is it?" he asks.

"The name starts with with a "C", so why don't you scroll down to the "C"s?" He looks at me blankly. "They're in alphabetical order." I explain for the 80th time. Then I grab the mouse, scroll down, and show him.

"Oh" he says. I'll be explaining alphabetical order again later today. Sigh.

I think when my company hires people (outside the IT department) they show them a computer and ask the applicant if s/he knows what it is. If s/he says no, then s/he gets hired. That would explain a lot.

Despite the fact that everyone here has a computer to work on, very few have any idea what they're doing. The marketing guy appearently designs websites in his spare time, so I had some expectations of him, but his knowledge is limited to slapping a few pictures together in Dreamweaver. He doesn't understand how to use Windows Explorer. Seriously. Oh, he does have one other skill, which is installing pirated programs. Yeah, that's great.

There's one other guy who seems into computers, but I let him install flash on his computer, so I'm afraid that he's going to get fired when his boss notices he spends his days watching Foamy the Squirrel. So sad.

From boredness at work I bring you: This lame review.

First Impression: It's pretty. But, um, wtf? They killed the menu bar. Which they did for IE 7, and the new Office kicks the shit out of the new IE in the prettiness department. Word even has a shiny blue gradient background to go behind your documents. Yay shiny.

So then I try using it for work, and I get all confused. How do I open files? How do I undo? Where is the autosum button? See Office 2007 replaced the menu bar with something called "ribbons", which look kinda like the menu bar except clicking on them changes what looks like the toolbar except it's the ribbon or something instead of opening a menu. It's wierd. I want my KOffice back, but I never had that at work anyways and this is at least prettier than the old MS Office so at least looking at it's wierdness isn't painful.

Figuring out how to do things wasn't as hard as I thought it would be at first. To find the autosum button, I clicked on the "Formulas" ribbon, and there was the autosum hieroglyphic, accompanied in big letters by the word "AutoSum". While I'm annoyed at having to click an extra button, I realize that if I had learned on this Excel I wouldn't have manually summed things up for so long until someone finally told me there was an autosum button.

So I tried Word, Excel, and Access, and all do what they did before, but with ribbons instead of menus and toolbars. The ribbons are well laid-out, and have easy to understand labels on almost all the icons. If you've found Office programs confusing in the past, you might want to check out this version because it might be easier for you.

Gripes:

1. My current annoyance is that it doesn't play well with Office 2003, which I need to use for work because I don't trust a beta Office to do everything right, or at least the way my coworkers are used to (I send out a lot of reports made in Office). Mostly that's a Windows problem, but Outlook 2007 would have uninstalled Outlook 2003 (at least it warned me) and part of my job involves telling people over the phone how to fix Outlook 2003 and that's *much* easier to do with it in front of me. So no new Outlook for me. Also, now all Office files default to 2007 (which is expected, but not what I want) and right clicking and choosing "Open with" gives me two options, both of which open 2007. *sigh* Still trying to figure that one out.

2. Office 2007 doesn't read ODT. Why? Because Microsoft sucks.

3. The eyecandy is nice, but it makes it useless for what I usually use Office for: pretending to work. Now, when people glance at my screen, instead of seeing some boring document, they see pretty shinies and come over to investigate. Since my "work" tends to be reading erotic fanfic copied from the internet, this is bad.

4. Office 2007 requires activation to use. I'm guessing once the final version comes out, all beta versions will be deactivated. This could be bad for some people, especially because Office 2007 saves by default to a different file format than previous versions. So if you don't plan on buying it, or don't expect your company to buy it, be careful and don't get yourself locked out of your data. Of course, if you're really paranoid about not locking yourself out of your data, you should just download OpenOffice and save everything to ODF and be done with it.

All in all, I think Office 2007 is a very pretty office suite that will be nice for newbies and people who never could figure out the more advanced features. Is it worth $150+ or whatever the prices will turn out to be? No, I don't think so, but to be fair I didn't review Sharepoint, or even all of the programs in the suite. I think if you've liked MS Office in the past and believe that office suites are worth paying for, then you'll probably be very happy with Office 2007. I personally just can't imagine spending that much for what looks to me like just eye candy. However, it's very likely that my job will purchase it for all of us, and, even though I shudder when I think of how much that will cost, I think my coworkers will like it very much. So, I think Miscrosoft will have a very pretty product by release date that will make them a shitload of money, and that was likely their goal, so yay for them.