Technology For Agents

Ryan Ward, a real estate specializing in Atlanta, Georgia real estate, wrote up a nifty review for Microsoft’s Office 2007 Suite that many real estate agents I’m sure have contemplating using (including me). With his permission, I’ve brought his review over to TechForAgents.com.

His review goes into depth on his experiences with the performance of Office in his day to day business, and what you can expect by migrating over to the new version of office.

Ryan Ward’s Review

I bought the Small Business Edition. Some good new tools for Word - graphs are a little easier and there are more choices for the look and feel of the graphs. Outlook opens EXTREMELY slow even after defragging twice. The database for the business contact manger seems to be the problem. I have not used it yet, mostly because I think I might need to actually read the manual! It is very customizable and looks to be a solid tool with more ease of use because all programs can now communicate with each other much better.

Microsoft Word and Excel

There are a few problems as I have found with Word…They have changed some of the rules for the way HTML is handled so if you have custom stationary with buttons linking to your website they may not work right in the new Outlook. That was a royal pain to get to work in the new and old versions for email.

You cannot create space between two buttons using “hspace”. I actually gave up and simply use 2 signatures - 1 for new messages and one for replies. It was very frustrating.

I haven’t had a reason to use excel except for Word graphs but Word appears to have quite a few new graphic templates and is easier to make documents look pretty. I would still use Publisher for anything more than a document with one photo.

Microsoft Publisher

Publisher appears to work the same with a slightly different look and feel and they claim that you can email the newsletters easier because it is integrated with Outlook. They do not translate at a high enough quality to use for a professional - at least I can’t figure out how to make it work yet.

Microsoft Business Contact Manager

The contact manager appears to be useful, but, you have to get it set up and I just haven’t been able to go through the learning process yet.

Conclusion

Office has worked a certain way for a long time and some of the changes have moved tools to completely new places and until you relearn where everything is, you are likely to be very frustrated.

All-in-all it is probably a better program than I am a user. That, I would say, is not a compliment to the program. I might say wait unless you have quite a bit of time to learn it.

You can read more about Ryan over at his Alpharetta Real Estate Blog.

-SC-