Yikes! - Office 2007 Training Fears Are Overblown, Microsoft Exec Says

From Office 2007 Training Fears Are Overblown, Microsoft Exec Says, Chris Capossela states the following about the new Ribbon in Office 2007

There are two data points that we talk about. No. 1 is, for your average Office user, we see that it takes them about two days of working with the product before they say, “I’ll never go back.” For your power user — the people who know the ins and outs of Excel, maybe the finance team, or the legal team when it comes to Word — it takes them more like two weeks before they’ll say, “Please don’t ever take this away.”

I fall into the category of Office power user, particularly in Excel. I've probably used 80%+ of the features in Excel including Pivots, Conditional Formatting, VBasic, Access Integration.... So when I read this article in Computerworld, my jaw dropped.

Two Weeks!!

I can't remember it taking me two weeks to learn any software application - ever. If I can't do something basic in a couple of hours, or complete basic tasks with a new application after a day of use, then I pretty much drop the application and try a new approach. Can you imagine if it took users two weeks to learn how to use the first version of the Netscape browser? What if it took two weeks of training to get a software developer to write their first Hello World app in Eclipse or in Visual Studio?

I have to be fair, I haven't seen Office 2007. Maybe it's true that the productivity benefits in the new version will make it all worthwhile, so I will hold final judgement (and will update this blog) when I do get around to testing Office 2007. But with a two week expected training period, migrating to Office 2007 will be at the bottom of my list.