Tags for Microsoft products are currently a mess.

Office:

• office, microsoft-office
• office-2007, office-2010, office-2010-beta, ms-office-2007, office-2008, microsoft-office-2010, office-2010, office-1997 _(wow...), office-2002, ms-office-2003

Word:

• microsoft-word, msword, word
• microsoft-word-2007, microsoft-word-2010, microsoft-word-2003, microsoft-word-2008
• word-2007, word-2003

Excel:

• excel, microsoft-excel
• excel-formula
• excel-2003, excel-2007, excel-2010, excel-2002

Powerpoint:

• powerpoint, microsoft-powerpoint
• powerpoint-2007, powerpoint-2010, powerpoint-2003
• powerpoint-video

Publisher:

• microsoft-publisher

Access:

• access, microsoft-access, ms-access
• microsoft-access-2007, microsoft-access-2003

There is very little structure or order in how Microsoft-related questions are being tagged. I think this should be cleaned up. I would like to propose the following tagging recommendations for office questions; feel free to critique my suggestions.

• Questions about a specific microsoft product, like Word, should be tagged like microsoft-word.
• Questions that pertain to a specific version of office, and would not apply to all/other versions, should be tagged like microsoft-office-2010
• Questions pertaining to any or many versions of office should be tagged microsoft-office

A question could have several of these tags, e.g. it might be tagged microsoft-office-2010 and microsoft-word if the question is about Word and is specific to the 2010 version. While more verbose than just microsoft-word-2010, it creates fewer redundant tags.

Tags above which do not fall into one of those categories/naming schemes should be retagged and eliminated, with the following exceptions:

• word might apply to some other things having to do with words, but posts with that tag should be manually checked and retagged if appropriate.
• office might apply to questions about office environments. Those sorts of questions should be retagged to home-office or something of that sort
• access might apply to questions about access control, etc. Those sorts of questions should be retagged to a more appropriate tag, as access is ambiguous.

Most of this retagging should be able to be accomplished by moderators automatically with a batch retag, e.g. ms-office-2007 to microsoft-office-2007. More nuanced ones, like the exceptions above, will need to be handled manually; I can do this if need be.

So, do these seem like reasonable suggestions? What changes would you recommend? And how can we try to encourage new users to tag accordingly?