Hmmm... I am using Office 2010 on XP and it seems just fine (at least Word and Excel). And I installed that on Lannie's Win7 machine and it appears to work OK. Which version is the problem? What I'd like to have back is a fully functional Outlook Express mail program. Mine is now refusing almost all graphic content. Something about not being able to translate MIME formats.
Oh, it works. But there are three things that are bothersome.
The first is the ribbon: I've used Word since version 2.0 (and other word processors before that) and the Office suite since 95. After so many years, the menu system was familiar and ready to mind. But with the ribbon, things were moved around: functions that were once grouped together are now split along different lines, requiring a year's worth of re-training just to be able to do something quickly. I should also say that Office 2010 is much more functional than 2007 was...
The second is the refresh key in in Outlook 2010. A Window's standard has been that pressing F5 would refresh the page, data, etc., of any program. It still is--hit F5 in any browser and the page refreshes. The same is true in every Office 2010 program (just as in all versions prior).... except for Outlook. Nope! The the Windows standard out the proverbial window! In order to refresh, one needs to press F9. Why?
Last is Microsoft's method for "securing" its applications. While originally designed as stand alone applications, Office applications had for year gained interopability with their counterparts. This allowed Word files to be pulled into Powerpoint and Access data to plug into Word form letters nearly seemlessly. Visual Basic for Applications, while quirky as a language, even allowed for automation between everything. This, however, led to potential security failures: a script embedded in an Excel document could (potentially) hijack your email and so on. This is not a matter to take lightly, and I applaud Microsoft for moving to protect users. However, their method was to, by default, lock down every single application and every project instance. This made things secure, but it also made it a nightmare for desktop support in office throughout the country, as developers who rolled out a new automated system that made things easier for personnel now needed to go around to every single machine to "allow" simple things such as a form letter template to work on individual machines (the security settings--at least for Office 2007, which was the last version for which I needed to provide such support--could not be added when such projects were posted to the network or client applications pushed to users' machines).
That said, if you (like me) skipped from Office XP to Office 2010, you did yourself a favor.
