Does anyone else think Word 2007 Sucks? Badly!!

The BBQ Pit
181

I think 40 is way underestimating the diversity of uses out there, but I understand your general point. I’d say the pool of most frequently used tools may be in the low hundreds or so, but again I agree with the essence of your point. I’m only bringing it up to avoid the 43! no, 45! See, now you’re up to 48 so you must be wrong! -type impression.

That’s a major missed opportunity with the glorified taskbar. I used to be able to choose the handful of toolbars that I needed to have visible and could float the few that I’d need for short periods. I could knock off those little-used formatting buttons until I had the primary and secondary ones visible, add a few buttons as necessary, then do the same with one or two other toolbars. After turning off the little-used toobars, I had just about everything I want withing several inches of each other. No meandering back and forth across the screen.
Rhythmdvl’s advice for Office 2010:
[ul]
[li]**Set MS developer’s loose on Ribbon Customizer **to do the standard Microsoft Rape n Pillage routine so that it gets fully incorporated (with improvements) into 2010. [/li][li]**Allow resizing and full manipulation of the ribbon **so that people can put their 40, 50, or whatever frequently used commands wherever they like – even if it means mixing reference commands with view commands. [/li][li]**Give up on trying to be unique little snowflakes and study commonalities between other programs. It’s OK to strike out on your own and name a new tab (e.g., reference), but recognize the pool of programs that people are used to using and the accompanying mindset.[/li][li]Drop the mandatory flashy shit. Some of it can be turned off, but many people who use word professionally don’t need to see the fancy previews. I just built a beast of a machine and even it take a moment to render pictures of page numbers. Let the morons who don’t know what “bottom right” looks like have their pictures, let the rest of us work.[/li][li]**Work on my list above **to fix things that you didn’t get working right the first time. [/li][/ul]

It’s my hope that Office 2007 goes down in history as the Windows ME/Vista of Office applications.

182

So. You’d have no style maintenance system. You’d have no change tracking. You’d have no reference tracking, no contents, no indexing, no page numbering, no lists - everything will be done manually, over and over and over again. Are you sure you’ve actually used a word processor before? More than once?

And, as Waenara points out, you’re eliding hundreds of individual functions with things like “right click to modify”. Modify how? How many commands does this entail? Picture borders, picture margins, columns, gutters, flow control, all of these things are utterly missing from your picture of the perfect word processor, and all of them are unavoidable if you want something that looks better than My First Skool Report. So, how do you go about making these things accessible to the user without cluttering the interface to buggery?

This is precisely what I hoped to illustrate: to talk about some ideal number of functions is absurd (and as a bonus, it’s highlighted your unreasonably narrow view of what a broadly-used software package should do). What’s important is to make common functions easily accessible, and other functions easily found. And guess what, the ribbon does show the main commands you mentioned front-and-center, and puts other commands where they can be easily found (at least, more easily than in Word 2003). You’re complaining about something that does almost exactly what you want. It’s bizarre.

183

What I don’t see as a problem is why not start out with a barebones approach - let’s say 40, one of which is “other functions” which users can open and pick and choose from as they wish.

I suspect I am not the only person who uses his word processing program for the production of text documents, nothing more. So I have no need to insert pictures, track text, etc. These things you folk are mentioning as necessary are things I have never done in 2 decades of daily word processing. For folk who wish these functions, couldn’t they click to the “other features” icon/menu which would contain all of their desktop publishing/customizing/data management/etc. options?

I’ve been using my present version of Word for over 5 years now, and when I look at my toolbars a good half of them I have never used and may not know what they are for. Yet there they are, taking up as much space as CUT, PASTE, COPY, SAVE, OPEN, PRINT. Same for WP. Hell, one of the things I hate MOST is when it kicks in some auto-formatting crap. For my uses, I can do just fine with tabs and the occasions center text.

Yes, I have customized my toolbars in the past to hide what is “clutter” for me. But I have had my customization undermined but whatever tech support has done to my computer or the system. Wouldn’t it be possible/preferable to, instead of having the least capable user try to hide or ignore things he will never use, to make it easy for the more adept users to open up and enable such functions?

184

Non-rhetorical question: where did the back-and-forth over the optimal number of commands come in? Are you saying that a “good” word processor must have all 1,500 or so commands visible to every user? That seems so odd that I’m pretty sure that’s not what you’re saying. (ETA: you do realize that under the customize options there is a slew of choices listed under “commands not on the Ribbon.”)

You seem to be taking umbrage with the notion that the vast majority of users work with some countable number (I’m using “countable” as an arbitrary variable, something far greater than ten but far fewer than 1,500) of commands. That is, if you take the size of the quicklaunch buttons (which seem to be about the same size as the buttons on the old toolbar), most users could fill up just about every command they need in two, maybe three rows. Yes, this involves dialogue boxes or dropdowns (so too with the ribbon), but this would fully serve most users, especially since there is still the menu system and ability to temporarily add floating toolbars.

How do you differentiate the Ribbon from a tabbed toolbar?

Why is the non-customizability (in terms of size, mix, and layout of commands) a positive aspect of the Ribbon?

I daresay that curing that defect (I know that begs the question, but I’m viewing its rigidness as a fault) would go far towards reconciling many users’ pique at Microsoft. While I understand that some people never look under the hood and would never customize anything, I don’t understand how lack of customizability — lack of a feature — isn’t recognized as a fault. (Again, I’m not sure what your views are, so please don’t get defensive if I’ve misunderstood them; feel free to correct.)

Where I suspect there is divergence in opinion is in the reorganization. I strongly hold to it being more of a by-product of a long-term marketing strategy and less about improving a product. Clearly there is overlap, but IMHO the prime motive of the former is in response to how to lock users into our system and make it harder to switch while the latter is in response to how to make our product better than Wordperfect/other competition.

Under either the old or the new scheme, a virgin user has a steep learning curve to find commands. At face value, MS is saying that their reorganization and re-labelling greatly lessens the slope of that curve — our product is better than WordPerfect because it’s now easier to learn and easier to use. I disagree. (As a side note, I do recognize that there are a lot of improvements to Word, and many things/dialogue boxes are indeed easier. I’m referring to the wide-scale reorganization.)

I disagree because the curve is not flat. MS could have made substantial strides in user friendliness without making such a massive reorganization. A completely new user is going to still have to learn about sections, styles, etc. None of these are intuitive concepts to someone who has never used a word processor before — an audience that is vanishingly small — and all are going to require intense investigation about what a command is and where its located. By the time such a user grows familiar enough to find other commands under the reorgainzed structure, they will have been able to follow the patterns of finding commands under the old structure – massive reworking is not a net benefit.

However, the majority of the audience are approaching the package with two sets of background knowledge. One is pre-existing familiarity with Word processors in general, the other with software in general. Both conflict with and demand re-learning an arbitrary set of new locations. Office fails to take advantage of user’s familiarity with semi-standard toolbars and organization. The majority of benefit to changing the shape of the curve are lost to this new direction. There is only cumulative benefit to learning MS’s new set of definitions, which harkens back to my claim that this was motivated by desire to lock people in to a system, not to improving the interface.

Certainly there were (and are) improvements over previous versions, but these improvements do not entail wholesale revamping of the menu system.

And then, well, then there’s all the other things that went wrong. No more email note in the task bar for any folder you have rules for? No more keyboard customizations in Outlook? Oh, the list goes on…

If it makes a difference (purely from a disclosure perspective, no swaggering or authority intended), I’m as tied to Word/Office as possible. I write and edit out of a home office, frequently collaborating with Mrs. Dvl who does the graphic design side of or business. Projects range from five to ten-page policy briefs to 2–300+ page, statistically heavy reports with oodles of graphics. I’m also pretty tech-prone (read: geeky). I build all the hardware in the office (except the Mac), manage multiple file, Web and backup servers, love learning basic programming languages (Applescript, MySQL, VBA) for our own and client purposes. I couldn’t wait to upgrade, really wanted to be blown away by improvements. While there wasn’t a complete lack of improvements, I was sorely disappointed.

185

What You Need.

[/Rod Serling]

186

I would have indexing. See my list of 40. Styles totally suck (in the Word sense of “Styles”); it’s one of the things I detest the most about Word. If I am going to work on a document that needs change tracking I’ll do it in FileMaker, not a word processor; that’s a database function.

WHY would you think I would not have page numbering? Page numbers go in the header or footer, where they have ALWAYS gone, and I clearly mentioned commands for adding/editing Headers and Footers in my list of 40; and in print setup / print dialog I said you could print odd or even pages only etc.

• who
• the
• bloody hell
• needs
• a
• “list function”?

If I wanna make a list I’ll type out a freaking list. Yeesh.

I promise that I have. And never, ever, Microsoft Word, or not voluntarily.

My count of 40 is a count of separate MENU ITEMS. If you wish to count commands by all means count the various likely modification commands (perhaps 10 for modifying table, 10 for modifying graphics box, etc). Does “Put the tab stop here instead of there” count as a “command”? Or is it reasonable to say “I would have a RULER and the tab stop would be a little black icon that the user drags left or right”?

Characteristics of the graphics box: center, left, or right align the graphic; center, top or bottom aligh the graphic; border; allow or disallow text flow around graphics box. Dunno what “picture margins” does or why you’d need it: if you want a white border around your picture put a white border around your picture in your graphics program and THEN paste it into the graphics box.

OK, good one. Add a Columns command somewhere.

What, are we word processors or plumbers here?

I turned in my share of academic papers and they looked fine.

If I can create the MENUS I want, containing the commands I want to be in them, hide all others, and get rid of any stupid freaking buttons, toolbars, ribbons, etc, so that what I see in front of me is mostly a blank white area in which to type, I may indeed be complaining about someting that does almost exactly what I want.

I need it to NOT start “making a list” or indenting without my permission or underlining words with squiggly little “I think maybe you misspelled that” lines or capitalizing words I typed in lower casse or changing the left margin of the preceding paragraph if I backspace over a hard return or change the formatting of a paragraph if I paste a sentence cut from a different paragraph or otherwise do ANY THING except what I explicitly tell it to freaking do, with the exception of

• it should auto line wrap when I reach the far right of the screen as defined by the right margin; and

• it should automatically paginate when I reach the bottom edge of the page

187

Too cluttered. Get rid of those silly icons that are under the menus. And the font, fontsize, and formatting icons, put those up in the menus as menu commands.

Can it do endnotes and footnotes? Can it do a graphics box?

188

Add this and you’ll have all the word processor power most people would ever use.

189

Other than a hilarious combination of user names, what is the AHunter3—Dead Badger pissing contest about?

Ahunter, do you feel somehow pressured into using styles? It’s OK if you don’t. Are you trying to say that no one needs to use styles? That’s laughable, and I’m pretty sure you’re not a drooling idiot. So it beats me.

(Oh, one thing I would take exception with — tracked changes. When moving between authors, editors, reviewers, and project managers, tracked changes and comments, while a database feature, are a necessary component of a word processor.)

190

Isn’t “styles” responsible for each paragraph (and also any text FROM a paragraph that is copied to the clipboard) having certain characteristics above and beyond the character-based characteristics like bold or italic, such that when you paste elsewhere it [del]ruins[/del] applies those attributes to the paragraph into which you paste?

191

I am livid that Outlook removed the ability to customize the keyboard. One of my most frequent macros is a simple paste-unformatted to avoid what you’re talking about.

Word’s implementation of styles has come a long way. There used to be tremendous fights with it to get it stop changing things randomly. I’d say this had stopped by Word 2000, though that wasn’t perfect.

If you have any sort of structural complexity to your document (various heading levels), style tools are an excellent way to manage the ultimate look. Yes it can be done manually, but this is an area where automation is a boon. Most of what I work with gets published – which means eventual export to InDesign or Quark. Though not every client demands it, it’s simple professionalism to turn in cleanly styled documents. Page layout is a whole world separate from word processing, and a well-styled document can save the designer hours of labour.

If you’re interested I can describe this in more detail, but suffice as to say there are a lot of people who benefit from good style implementation (not that Word’s home tab doesn’t suck ass). But if you don’t have a call for it, you don’t need to use it.

192

Would you like it if the page numbers auto-updated whenever you made changes to the document that changed them? Or do you prefer to go back through the table of contents and make those corrections yourself every time it comes up?

193

Why would you put in the page numbers before you are DONE? And when you ARE done it’s easy to do a FIND for the symbols you use to indicate start of section and get the page numbers and type them in to your table of contents.

In order for them to work AUTOMATICALLY, the little chunk of characters that constitutes your section title (or the section break) has to be an Officially Recognized Part of the Structure, not just some boldface centered characters that you typed in somewhere. The more true structural elements your word processor has to deal with, the more likely it is to become an annoying and badly-behaved beast that thinks it knows better than you do what to do with the characters that you are typing.

194

Mm? Why wouldn’t I?

Anyway, I’m sure you know all the stuff about word processors that annoys you can be turned off fairly easily.* So what you’re aggravated about is the fact that it’s on by default. You don’t like having to do something in order to make it the way you like it. On the one hand that’s understandable. On the other hand it’s something like complaining about having to dial one for English. Somebody is going to have to dial one, why not you? Somebody is going to have to switch off or on the options they don’t like, why not you?

*Of course you can’t just get rid of the ribbon. I do think it could be good to have the ribbon hide itself when not in use, kind of like the taskbar in windows. I’d be down with that. For others, not for myself. I’m not as big into having “just a clean white sheet of paper in front of me” as you and some others seem to be.

195

Or I can just a word processor that is already considerably closer to what I like.

196

You, AHunter3 can use a quill and parchment if it makes you happy. I don’t think anyone is saying that you personally need to use styles, tracked changes, comments, or page numbers. There seems to be honest answers to questions about the usefulness of such features, but though addressed to you personally I think the answers have been more along the lines of “this is why someone would use such a feature and how you could use it to your advantage.”

197

Every time MS decides to force an “improved” version upon us, there’s a learning curve. Mostly it consists of searching for “where the hell did they put Feature X”? But with 2007, they did away with features that were quite useful. Supposedly they do research with end users, but having been using Office 2007 for a few months now, I SERIOUSLY doubt that any of those end users actually write reports or create spreadsheets or databases.

Anytime a person trying to do productive work has to take their hands off of the keyboard and “mouse-up” some command or another, it wastes time they could be writing.

So to make a short story longer, yes, I hate it. Word and Access seem to be worse regarding missing useful features that were available in 2003, but Excel has its own weird little glitches.

198

What are some examples?

199

Well sure, and by the way, which word processor is that?

200

I’m not sure I’ll explain this correctly, but just one example is in Word with the way formatting styles are viewed. In 2003, there was a drop down box that could be set in the menu to always be visible, and when you put your cursor anywhere in the text, you could simply glance up and see what formatting that particular text was. In 2007 it’s about a 5 step mousing process. Time consuming (ergo project budget wasting), annoying, and tedious.

In fact, the whole way formatting styles work in 2007 is extremely annoying and time-consuming.

The glitch in Excel is the "file is locked for editing by “X” error. It occurs for no apparent reason, (though online research at several zillion tech sites suggests it has something to do with the compatibility feature). What happens is that a user will open a spreadsheet and the dialogue box will return a “file is locked for editing” message with the user’s own name. And the user doesn’t have it open on another computer, did NOT have the SS close due to an save error earlier etc.

Also, the ribbon, while it does work, is very time-consuming to use. Again, a lot of time spend with your hands off of the keyboard and having to “mouse” really slows down writing.

Big pain in the butt. Those are just a few I can think of off the top of my head.