Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Office 2003 had it's share of difficulties, but was overall a useful application, as were the previous versions of Office. I was never a huge fan, but appreciated the common logic of the application and with each upgrade they've continued to move forward with improvements. Now they've introduced a set of applications that are a gigantic leap backwards in productivity and usability. It's loaded with overburdened, irregular icons and hidden menus. All of the menu sets, menu names, and functionality has been completely rearranged with no noticeable benefit for the user. Even the help functionality, of all things, has been rendered completely differently and contains less information and more generalities referencing help for Word within Outlook and vice versa. This would be helpful except that the same menu name bears entirely different meaning between the two applications now. Menus are also too light so you can't really tell if highlights are active or passive in drop menus. Drop menus change radically within each element of the frame or window, and there are layers upon layers of custom menus you need to build from scratch. Let me say that again... you need to build your own menus. I'm not kidding. Basic functionlity that you used to find as a default icon in the last several versions you need to hunt down in a "Quicklaunch" type supermenu that's hidden above (or below) the default icon menu. I am a web usability, design, and production professional who's used more beta applications and experimental software than most users could imagine and I'm warning *anyone* to stay away from this until you absolutely must upgrade. Microsoft needs time to get the content updated on the help screens and create some functionality to return to "classic" menus that can be customized later. I generally have a lot of patience for new applications and have been accused of being to accomodating to bad usability by Microsoft in the past. Well in this case, I've never been so frustrated by *any* application. I need to be productive and this set me back by at least a day already. Be warned!!!!!