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There is, however, no "compatibility mode" or way to restore the old interface, and Microsoft has stood firm on this. Office gurus who loved to create their own toolbars and stick them anywhere they pleased will be incensed. The only concessions to the old toolbar system are a single customizable toolbar that's more or less locked to the top of the Word window, and a customizable status bar at the bottom. It's frustrating that I can't stick a toolbar with many of my most common commands (not the stuff Microsoft thinks is important) down at the bottom of the window where I can get to it with minimal mouse movements.
Perhaps in a future iteration Microsoft will back off a bit on this stance and allow a little more flexibility in how you can handle the Quick Access bar, but as it stands now it feels like an incentive to not use the whole toolbar metaphor in the first place. You can still assign custom to any command or macro, though -- something most Office junkies, myself included, did habitually.
Over time, though, these frustrations came to feel less like deal-breakers than they seemed at first. I worked with Word for a solid week, writing not just this review but a number of other documents in it. I found over time I was paying less attention to the program and more attention to my work, and I think that was precisely the idea.
Getting Subtle
In fact, Word 2007 is far less habitually intrusive on the whole. Clippy and all such related annoyances are completely gone; instead, the program uses subtle cues rather than overt ones to attract your attention. If you highlight a block of text, for instance, a text-formatting hover menu appears, but it's heavily faded out; you only use it if you actually hover over it, and if you don't want it, it vanishes as soon as you shift focus to something else. I didn't use this menu much, but it was quite handy when I did need it, and the rest of the time it wasn't obtrusive at all.
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