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Perhaps most noteworthy is the 10% of companies that use a Linux-only solution for their desktops. This statistic might surprise observers who know that Linux desktop use in the overall population is about 3 percent. But in fact it’s not that surprising, Melde says. “There have long been a few stalwarts,” on the Linux desktop in the business environment. Moreover, in the last couple of years the Linux desktop has made great strides in terms of usability, he observes, pointing in particular to Ubuntu, which he calls the “most usable.” It’s gotten to the point where you don’t have to be a geek to run Linux on your desktop – even regular people are doing it. “My 80-year-old father runs Linux,” Melde says. “He didn’t set it up, but he runs it just fine.”
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Because the new Office user interface is more graphical, making more features and functions visible and accessible at a glance, it may very well be, as Microsoft claims, easier to use for people who are new to the application or who use it only occasionally. But it is different enough from all past versions that devotees will need time to learn new ways of doing things, and many will be frustrated by the seemingly gratuitous changes. Worse, advanced Excel customers will find that any customizations they've made, especially to toolbars and menus in earlier versions, have disappeared and, in many cases, cannot be recovered. The same goes for macros, the little shortcut programs you write to perform repetitive or complex actions within an application.
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However, Excel 2007 does offer more reasons to switch than Word 2007. Note, however, that some of the best of the new capabilities are not available to people who buy the low-end Office Small Business 2007 package. You also need Microsoft SharePoint 2007 with Excel Services for some of the advanced features to work.
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