As you can probably guess, we work with a very large number of businesses who will have an interesting selection of Office versions. For us, this makes for more of a challenge in developing the templates, but does raise some cross-over questions for the users, who don’t always get the training they need.
In just the last few months, we have completed projects in old [Office 2002] and new [Office 2010], and there are some big differences for the user and what we can do to make a better template. Most corporates have a staging process of upgrade, which usually means skipping a version or two as the years go by. This is often down to cost, as the maintenance contracts for Microsoft are not cheap if you have more than just a couple of dozen users. We work in Office 2003 most weeks, despite the fact that this is now eight years old. In a recent project, which was specified as Office 2007, the specification changed quite dramatically when we found out that they only had Office 2003. This is especially true of PowerPoint.
Software gets better, that’s the general purpose of upgrades, and Office is no different. We have all of the Office versions here, so we also know what issues there are in each version, or from version to version. There are, for instance, a number of compatibility issues between the Mac and Windows versions, some of which mean that a number of features cannot be used if a cross-platform solution is required.
So, is it time for you to upgrade? If you are currently using Office 2003 or earlier, then we would recommend that you upgrade to Office 2010. With the new file format and the very useful new features and functionality, you will see some very important improvements, as well as be more prepared for receiving documents from outside your organisation.
If we can be of help in this process, upgrade your current templates, or assist in training, call us today.