I received a bit of unsolicited commercial email from SmartDraw that claimed I can get the benefits of Microsoft Office 2007 without the costs and headaches of upgrading. In smaller type they claimed that the biggest improvements in Office 2007 over previous versions is new graphic and drawing tools. That you can buy their product and get those graphics improvements without upgrading Office.
I wonder how many people would agree with their premise. For me, I hadn't noticed changes in graphics, but as a security guy I think Office 2007 is a great security update. While many of the improvements have been backported to Office 2003 in service pack 3, 2007 is still safer as seen in the latest Powerpoint zero day.
I'm also pretty happy with Outlook since the Feb 2009 update.
Paying $80-200 for Smartdraw so you can stay on a 5 year old version of Office, just doesn't seem like such a good plan.
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