Joe -

I actually have said before, maybe even in this thread, that Vista and Office 2007 may be pretty good. I've also commented that for most users, most things probably will work as expected.

The problem is that they've completely changed the entire language used to find and use simple functions that were very well known and easy enough to find in prior versions, especially if the required features aren't on the "new beginners' list."

Your description of "start using it - discovering new features as I go along is great, if it works for you.

Unfortunately, for my uses of Word I have to be able to use many of your "new features" from the start. I don't have the luxury of stumbling on them later; and by arbitrarily renaming, regrouping, relocating, and separating functions that I use together so that I have to wander around through multiple unidentifiable menus located in strange places, they've made it very much more difficult for me to use Word 2007 for what I expect to do with it. Feedback among other professional/advanced users is that they universally have the same problems and objections.

This would not be quite so much of a problem if there was useful documentation of the changes, but most "above-beginner-level" functions require opening many separate web pages¹ (conveniently linked from the Word Help entires) and in effect wandering all over the Office 2007 web site to find what used to be single concise entries. KB articles typically are very specific about addressing a single topic in each article, so it's very rare to find one that addresses a "how to" in full.

¹ Without a web connection to pull "help files" from the Microsoft web site, as when I'm sitting in my camper waiting for a festival to start, Word 2007 Help files are almost useless, since the content for advanced methods isn't in the program or anywhere on your local machine. You have to look for scattered KB articles and/or "white papers" at Microsoft to get what few answers have been written, and the needs of advanced users are very sparsely addressed.

I also find multiple explanations of how to do setups that were common that consist of "you can't do that in Word 2007." I'm sure that there is something else I can do to get the same, or pretty similar, result, and eventually I'll find it; but they don't tell me what the new procedure is that they've arbitrarily (and not very rationally) provided to replace what many more proficient users have used in previous versions.

If there was an alternate program to seriously compete with Word previous versions for advanced professional users, I'd be looking at it. I know enough about the alternatives to know my preferences and what I expect, and there is no acceptable alternate for what I use Word to do.

I expect to be able to make Word 2007 do what I need, but I should be able to RTFM and get answers reasonably quickly. There is no Word 2007 manual for advanced users, which is essentially my only really serious objection².

² (Except that my scroll wheel still doesn't work, was reported by MANY USERS five years ago in Beta 2, and Microsoft has no fix for it in Word 2007 Professional. Maybe all three of my "Microsoft Brand" mouses are "incompatible hardware," but they don't tell me so, they're the only ones on the shelf at my suppliers, and Microsoft doesn't choose to tell me what to get instead.)

John