COMPUTING: MICROSOFT OFFICE 2007

As part of the general complicated cock-up when I got my new superduper pc from Mesh, I ended up losing all my pre-installed software which included MS Office. As I couldn't afford to buy another copy at the time I went for the free Open Office software of which I'd seen a number of good write-ups. While not exactly a mistake, I just could never really get to grips with it and things I could find easily in Office (although I'm really talking about Word here as that's the program I use most) I had to dig for in O.O. if I could find them at all. Finally after tearing my grey hair out over it one too many times, I decided to buy a copy of MS Office.

I scouted around until I found what seemed to be a bargain -cheap price and included all the Office programs. Catch was, it was for students only. Fair enough. So I bought it for my nephew Alex who has just started at Hull University. Alex, being a kindly soul, allows me to use it when he doesn't which, him being in Hull and me being in Sunderland, is so far most of the time.

I hadn't actually used the 2007 version before and was used to the pull-down menus so the new arrangement when you clicked on a heading to access a different toolbar was a bit strange for about five seconds but I soon got used to it.

It's like coming home. Microsoft comes in for a lot of flack but I just love Word. As far as I'm concerned, it's the best piece of software for the home user ever. It's also nice to have Publisher, Powerpoint and Excel again for the options they provide. I'd recently designed a new version of the Animal Krackers leaflet on O.O. and it was a sod to do.

My next big adventure in computing will be installing Windows 7 which I managed to pre-order when it was briefly being offered for £40 and change. Having got my hands on a, genuinely, free copy of Paragon Drive Backup I'm feeling confident there won't be any problems in restoring all the data and software into the W7 environment.

I shall let you know.