Oh, thank goodness! I recently upgraded to Office 2008 on my Mac - work upgraded us all to the same for PC, and I reluctantly followed along at home since Word now saves things as .docx instead of .doc ~ actually, there is very little about 2008 I like better than 2004, and a great deal I loathe. After fifteen years of using MS Office as my go-to program for word processing and spreadsheets, the 2008 version felt like I had to learn the suite all over again. Previous upgrades were similar enough to their predecessors that I could easily adapt and learn all the new features quickly. Not so with this one. Every. Single. Time. I went to do something, I had to stop and think "now where is that command?" Talk about interrupting work flow! As a writer, I found Word particularly frustrating. Every day when I opened a doc, I would grit my teeth and mutter deprecations as I went about my work. When I write, I want to have my head totally in whatever I'm working on, not wondering where the heck I need to go in oder to format something, or turn track changes on, etc.
From what they show of 2011 in that article, it looks like it takes a step back to the command style of old, which is a huge improvement for me. I'm not against upgrading, but when navigating the software has been essentially the same for two decades, where's the value in totally changing everything overnight? At least give a display option for those of us who prefer the older "style".
