Buy Office Home and Student 2007 now or wait for 2010 version?

[Bernie]

I have Office 2002. Should I buy into Office Home and Student now or wait a
couple of months and get 2010 version? I am a casual user and do an
occasional powerpoint. Will there be a price reduction on 2007 when 2010
comes out? is 2010 going to be a better all around tool for a casual user, or
the upgrades for the more sophisticated users? Thanks. Bernie

 

[dlw]

You should consider OpenOffice (openoffice.org) it's new and free.

 

[JLatham]

First, I haven't looked at 2010 at all yet, so this is all "uninformed
opinion". Historically most of the added features to the entire Office line
have been along the lines of improving use among groups or making the
applications more "net aware". While Excel 2007 added some long awaited
functions [SUMIFS() comes to mind], that kind of thing is generally the
exception that proves the rule.

For a single user, I can't think of a thing I can do with 2007 that I
couldn't do in Excel '97. Many things I do today for clients could have been
done in older versions of Excel. Most of those things aren't even
"collaborative" although they may do a lot of data accessing of other Excel
files or databases on their own LAN. Somehow we manage to get by mostly on
Excel 2003, and the differences between 2002 (XP) and 2003 were negligible.

As far as price breaks on 2007 when 2010 hits the street? Well, who knows?
That's not a given, but all things considered, I'd place a small wager that
2007 will be discounted quite a bit once 2010 is released.

Quite frankly, given your description of your use of Office and it's
applications, I'd probably stick with what I have, or, as dlw said - give
consideration to Open Office if you end up with an occassional demand for the
2007 file format.