If Lamb Chop were just starting their thesis, on the other hand, I would
recommend Word 2007 without hesitation. With lots of equations and figures,
a standard .doc format document is a corrupted document just waiting to
happen. In my year or so using the new .docx format (since early beta), I've
found it to be a lot more robust and a lot less corruption resistant than
the .doc format. I also find that .docx documents scroll and page a lot
faster than .doc format documents.
Depending on what kind of figures Lambchop means, the new graphics
capabilities in Office 2007 can produce some really sophisticated graphs &
charts, too. Those capabilities might ultimately mean that it takes less
time to prepare those aspects and getting them to look right.
Depending on how reference heavy the thesis is, the citation/bibliography
feature *might* be useful, but I find that it's more useful for lightweight
research papers than for heavy-duty academic papers.
Yes, Word 2007 is new. But, I use both it and Word 2003 daily, and I have
many fewer problems with Word 2007. More than once, I've actually been able
to repair documents that were hopeless broken in Word 2003 by using Word
2007's Open and Repair command. I would have expected it to be basically the
same as Word 2003's Open and Repair, but since my success rate is higher in
2007, I have to believe that it's been tweaked.
OTOH... if you're heavily invested in AutoText entries and rely on the
AutoComplete feature, Word 2007 might well be your worst nightmare.
--
Herb Tyson MS MVP
http://www.herbtyson.com
Author of the Word 2007 Bible
Please respond in the newsgroups so everyone can follow along.
"Jay Freedman" wrote in message
...
Lamb Chop wrote:
I am going to buy a laptop next month. I would like to get vista
business 64bit. I am thinking whether I should use my old office2k
or buy the latest office07.
I use word mainly for editing my thesis which has a lot of equations
and figures. The documents are usually fair large with a lot of
graphics and thousands equations.
excel for basic calculation and sometime drawing some graphs but I
mainly use sigma plot, a scientific grapher.
Access for keeping up the basic data base.
Powerpoint, only occasionally. Once in every half year.
========
Any comments on comparing office2k and 07 would be appreciate. Will
office07 run better in a 64bit environment?
Thanks
Bearing in mind that this is only my opinion, and that I haven't tried
running anything on a 64-bit system yet...
I think you're a prime candidate to stay with the older version of Office
for a while. When you're in the middle of writing a thesis, the last thing
you need is to spend a couple of months figuring out where everything went
in the new user interface. This isn't a matter of speed or great new
features, it's a matter of reprogramming your brain and your fingers.
After your thesis is complete, you can get Office 2007 and spend all the
time you like on it.
Word 2007 has a new equation editor (although the old one is still there
and still works the same as before). It has the big advantage that the new
variety of equation is in some sense "ordinary text" that's just displayed
differently, while the old variety is an "object" that has to be
interpreted by an external DLL. When you put in hundreds, let alone
thousands, of the old-style equations in a single document, Word could
become sluggish or unstable. That shouldn't happen with the new variety.
If you already have a lot of equations, though, Word doesn't have any way
to convert them to the new variety -- they would remain as objects unless
you manually retype them.
Another consideration: Office 2007 is only a couple of months past general
release, a period some people call "gamma test". :-) There will be a
period for at least a few more months while people install it in
configurations that were never seen in the beta test or in Microsoft's
very extensive internal testing, and find more latent bugs. Unless you're
adventurous, let others find them and wait for the first Service Pack.
Both the old Office and Office 2007 are 32-bit programs. All else being
equal, running them in a 64-bit OS on a 64-bit processor won't speed them
up. Indeed, it could make them slower, because every instruction has to be
converted from 32 bits to 64 bits and every result has to be converted
back to 32 bits (a process called "thunking"). On a new PC, particularly
if it's a high-speed dual-core processor, you probably wouldn't notice
that penalty. But there's no big advantage in 64-bit operation for Office,
only for programs that are compiled for 64 bit use.
--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
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