I haven't used office 2013 yet, but the idea that Office's day-to-day features haven't improved much since '97 is really strange to me. Office 2007, for instance brought a huge [1] number of features, which I use all the time. Better style settings, much better equation editor, automatic referencing and massive, massive usability improvements (especially Excel 2007) are all things that I use in almost every single document I create.
Those "massive usability improvements" for you were a massive step backwards for me and many other power users. It confirmed tat my switch to OSX was the right choice, as I had to abandon all of the hard-learned short cuts anyway.
I strongly agree with the original post - there has been no real pace of improvement in Office, and that's just sad.
Indeed by 2007 I had more or less gotten rid of Word and gone to LaTeX. I haven't looked back since. It may not be for everybody but it is wonderful as a document generation environment.
I recently switched to LateX Beamer for my presentations, and all I can say is "Wow." There is no easier way to create better looking presentations than that.
(Actually, in all honesty, my LaTeX experience has changed the way I have used Word in those few cases I have had to use it, for example a contract writing technical documentation for Microsoft. I think every Word user should give LaTeX a try for a while. If you go back to using Word or similar, you can but your approach to documents will be much better.)
I'd like it if the next version of Word came with a device that zaps the user every time they try to change the font/style/size in-place. Than clippy should come out asking "it looks like you were about to do something stupid, would you like to learn about styles?"
> It confirmed tat my switch to OSX was the right choice, as I had to abandon all of the hard-learned short cuts anyway.
Changes in Microsoft Office confirmed your choice to switch to a different Operating System? I assume you meant you switched to an office suite that only runs on OSX?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_2007#New_features