the ultimate online exercise system!

Upgrading to new versions of Microsoft Office is often discussed in terms of new features or improved ergonomics. But we found other reasons to refrain from automatically upgrading our corporate licences to the very latest versions of Microsoft’s finest…

In our firm, we’re still unabashed users of Microsoft Office 2003. Of course this apparent conservatism is not unusual in business, which has largely eschewed Windows Vista and stuck with Windows XP even though the latter is now eight years old. This accords with a simple, solid business principle: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But in other respects, here at The Word Gym we’re fairly sophisticated users of technology who are not averse to keeping up-to-date with recent developments – provided, of course, we can see the benefits of doing so. So for example, we use OneNote 2007 because it is vastly superior to the 2003 version and brings with it genuinely useful features such as collaborative networking.

No, our reason for failing to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007 is much more pragmatic. As a language company, we make much use of spelling and grammar checkers across a very wide variety of languages. During the Office 2003 era, Microsoft used to sell the entirety of their spelling and grammar checking tools on a single CD-ROM, for a very reasonable price (I forget exactly how much it was now, but seem to remember it was in the region of £90 – and remember, that included ALL languages). These tools could be installed alongside Office, and were instantly accessible to all Office applications.

With the advent of Office 2007, things changed. In a sneaky move inspired, no doubt, by Steve Ballmer himself, Microsoft started to charge for each “language pack” (including the spelling and grammar checkers for an individual language) as separate units, priced at about £30 each. A little while ago, I calculated that if we upgraded our versions of Office to the very latest 2007 versions (I haven’t even started to look at 2010!), we would have to spend around £600 per user to install the language packs we most commonly use (still far short of the comprehensive offering available for Office 2003)! Not amusing!

Of course we do have other options nowadays, fortunately. There is a wide variety of (open-source) spellcheckers available for OpenOffice and StarOffice (not to mention the impressively comprehensive spellcheckers used in SoftMaker Office, recently endorsed by the German government). There are other commercial and open-source spellcheckers such as e.g. aspell or ispell (for an interesting overview of spellchecking trends in general, see Wikipedia). But the strength of Microsoft’s offering – for which one can forgive the occasional spellchecking inaccuracy – lies in the combination of spellchecking with grammar checking. While the grammar checker will never be any good as a style checker – despite its pretensions to be one – it is surprisingly useful as a convenient indicator of silly errors such as double spaces, repeat words, false agreements and so on. At the present time, no other software suite offers such a comprehensive tool – so you could argue, not unreasonably, that Microsoft’s decision to jack up the price is simply a reflection of both its value and its uniqueness. But as a long-term user of Microsoft Office since its very earliest days, I have to say the discrepancy still rankles.

Give us a break, Steve. It’s long-term users like us that have put so many billions of dollars into Microsoft’s reserves…