The fact that both of us now have shiny new Vista-running laptops meant that we needed new Office software. Well, Fuzzy NEEDED it, I was doing fine with Office XP. I mean, it’s friendly, and comfortable like an old pair of sneakers or blue jeans that faded from wear and not some designer’s vision.

But I’m all about the shiny. We looked at the prices of the seventeen million versions of Office currently on sale (for those values of seventeen million roughly equal to four) and determined that a) we’re cheap, sometimes; b) we pretty much only use Word and Excel; c)We only needed to install software on three machines; and d) we were kinda curious about what OneNote was. We therefore decided that $150 (rounding) for the Home/Student version, which is licensed for three machines, was perfect.

(As an aside, I’ve been running XP in Crossover on my MacBook, because NeoOffice just isn’t pretty enough for me, and it works fine, but I can’t access my network drives from within Word within Crossover, so I splurged and ordered the Mac version of Home/Student last night.)

I’ve been using the new version of Word for about a week now, and…I’m not sure I like it. It seems that whoever designed Vista and Office 2007 sat down and said, “Let’s make software that is as UN-intuitive as possible, charge more for it, and call it an improvement.”

In order to get a simple word count, something I need on almost every piece I write for work, you have to go through seventy thousand (or three) levels of menus. Also, I cannot find the UNDO option. UNDO was totally my best friend in previous incarnations of Word.

Unrelated: don’t you live my universe where 17 million = 4 but 70,000 = 3?