Visio Standard 2007 Upgrade Disappointing!
Douglas Karr at 9:07 pmThe ribbon interface in Office 2007 has really been amazing to work with, I’m impressed by the incredible usability of the interface. True, it’s a bit of a pain to find some of the features you were used to accessing easily pre-2007. It’s not that they actually made sense before, but you got used to where to find things.
I upgraded to Office Professional 2007 a few months ago, but of recent I’ve been using Visio much more than I used to. I had a Professional license for Visio 2003. I love Visio to plot out professional looking floorplans, network diagrams or business processes in a matter of minutes. I’ve been using Visio since before Microsoft purchased the package.
My favorite feature of Visio is its support of SVG. That single feature has allowed me to leverage both Visio and Illustrator to make some incredible graphical diagrams - and to do them quickly.
Being the geek I am, I hated seeing Visio Professional 2003 next to all those Office 2007 applications. So, I decided to take my (personal) hard-earned money and upgrade. I couldn’t justify the expense of the Professional version of Visio 2007 so I upgraded from Visio Professional 2003 to Visio Standard 2007. At least I thought it was an upgrade…
Visio 2007 doesn’t utilize the ribbon interface at all. In fact, I had a difficult time finding any new features with Visio Standard 2007 until I googled and found an old forum post pre-release to find what the improvements were. I’m upset because not only did I not gain anything by spending $130, I actually lost a much more. It appears that all the advanced stencils I had access with Visio Professional 2007 are gone… poof.
Office 2007 was worth the expense - I truly do believe it was a major improvement (although I did notice Word still fumbles on the bulleted lists AGAIN… Office hasn’t fired the bullet dude yet but they need to). I was starting to appreciate Microsoft’s innovation again. The Visio 2007 upgrade has been a let down, though. Bill and team at Microsoft - I feel like you owe me - I really feel like I just paid for a downgrade.
