Remember Word 97? I definitely remember it, and not with anything even remote to glee.

When I used to work as MS Office Support Specialist at Ericsson and Compaq, I frequently had to teach people how to compare documents, which means you compare one version of a document with another. Word then told us what the differences were, and we could, very painstakingly, go on with our lives and try to understand how to make sense of it all.

Where I work, we're starting a migration-phase to switch from Office 97 to Office 2007. Technically, there are a few things that cannot be trifled with. Educationally, one has to get to the users before Office 2007 gets to them; read this article about the need for users to know things about Office 2007 before they start using it.

I can't say I've gotten used to Office 2007 yet, but it's coming along nicely as I discover the little things that are improved from previous versions, e.g. comparing documents.

At the top of this post you have a screen-shot from Word 97. It displays a comparison of two Word 97-documents, and points out the changes. Pretty simple, and pretty horrid if you've ever worked with a document longer than a few pages, requiring meticulous attention.

Now check the other screen-shot, comparing the same documents as above; this one's Word 2007, though. Check its flickr-page to see the notes on what's what in the new user interface, and you'll soon realise the new version's a lot more sensible to use when comparing documents.

The battle of getting fluent with Office 2007 rages on...