Windows 7 - And Not Word 2007?

As so often again it is a customer's question that started this article; thank you Joan L.

Background: The lady recently bought a new computer with Windows 7 as the operating system. She had asked me to do the set-up-job that I highly recommend for every new brand-name computer. The set-up-job is described here.

She sent me the following question:

I was expecting to have Word 2007.   ???    Is it available "somewhere" and I have not found it?

Why where you "expecting" Word 2007? There is absolutely no connection between the numbering systems in Microsoft software. The Windows operating system has had historically names like

• Windows 95. 98 ( and NT and 2000 for professional use)
• Windows ME, XP and Vista and
• Windows 7 (since 2009)
  
• Windows 8 (per end of October 2012)

Microsoft's office software of which Word is only a part was historically named

• MS Office 97, 2000, 2003 and then
• MS Office XP
• MS Office 2007 and 2010
  

You can see that in both product groups (Windows operating system and MS Office) Microsoft wildly jumps between names, years and numbers.

Again, there is NO correlation between Windows and MS Office.

I believe you said - as most of my customers do - that you did not want to pay another $100 or more to Microsoft because the free office suite LibreOffice enables you to create, modify and open the common MS Office file types .doc, .xls and .pps (for Word, Excel and Powerpoint files respectively). That is why I installed LibreOffice on your computer as part of above mentioned set-up-job.

The main and most obvious difference between MS Office and LibreOffice is that the latter still adheres to the time proven menu paradigm while Microsoft as of Office 2007 has switched to the new ribbon interface. 

I am an old menu user and personally have huge problems doing simple things in the ribbon interface. It is so bad that I installed a function that gives me back menus in MS Word and MS Excel. But that is besides your question, I apologize.

Not in my email response to the lady but worth mentioning in this context is that the Windows operating system and MS Office are licensed independently of each other. With the purchase of a Windows computer you buy a license to use the operating system. If you want to use MS Office you have to buy an additional license.

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

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