What is the adoption rate for Office 2007?

Question

This IS a programming-related question.

The actual numbers should guide how we build our app.

Answer 1

A programming related question, that should not be asked to programmers.

Answer 2

I don't have the exact numbers, but from personal experience, I have found the adoption to be very low, especially among larger organizations. None of my clients (mainly banks and media companies) has Office 2007 installed. Most are currently using 2003.

If you are just producing documents that will be consumed, then people can use the free plugins from Microsoft for Office 2003 to allow them to work with 2007 documents. If you are planning to automate Office, then I would suggest targetting 2003.

Answer 3

You need to build your app to be compatible with both Office 2007 and previous versions.

(Marketing reason: You should not kick many potential customers off. Exact rate of adoption is not important; for example looking at received mails amount with docx type attachments seems that Office 2007 is already widely used. In our tiny company 4 of 20 people are using Office 2007 either.)

Answer 4

Everybody I work with is using 97, XP, or 2003.

Answer 5

Of the places that use MS Office, I've seen a mix of mostly 2000 and 2003. 2007 adoption is quite slow and I've seen a surprising amount of StarOffice/OpenOffice out there.

Answer 6

<joke> "The adoption rate is @#$^!#$%!#^" and you can quote me on it. </joke>

joking aside, I wouldn't bet hardly anything on any given user Office '07 installed and personally, I would not buy any product that requires I have it (maybe even if I already had it).

Answer 7

I know that my university adopted it this year.

(For myself, I dropped MS products years ago.)

Answer 8

I'm not sure of the numbers, but my organization, which has about close to 700 employees, upgraded to Office 2007 over the spring (2008) and we've had very few problems since then.

Answer 9

Our company rolled out Office 2007 this year, but only to gain compatibility with Sharepoint.

I know another anecdotal data point isn't necessarily helpful, so here's some hard data courtesy of Google:

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/business_applications/office_2007_is_inevitable.html

Answer 10

You can perform a flawed analysis yourself, but this is at least better than relying on the undisclosed methodology of outfits like Forresters, by Googling for Office file formats. For example

1. I get 27 400 000 ghits for filetype:doc over the past 12 months, vs.
2. the 578 000 ghits I get for filetype:docx over the same period.

The proportion will, of course, understate adoption of Office 2007/2010, but it suggests that the older programs are still well-used, and the older format is not being rejected.