This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 22 March 2006.

Once again, Microsoft have drastically changed their Office interface.

While the new interface is very nice eye-candy and probably has some new features that could help (arguably), it represents yet another need to re-train.

The old argument that OpenOffice is too different from MS-Office to be quickly useable has just vanished. OpenOffice is more like MS-Office 97 than MS-Office 2007 will be, and really, who has needed any of the features in Office XP or Office 2003? What were they, again…? Oh yeah, anoying interface changes, and removal of the stupid Paperclip.

I think I'll be distributing my work documents in PDF, created by OOo now, except where I must absolutely use MSO documents for work. Everthing else will be OOo. Now I just need to convince my wife that it's not worth continually purchasing MSO, or even having it on our home PC.