No reason, if you do all your own work, or share only with other OO users. I’ve gotten some Open Office documents from a co-worker in which the formatting is slightly screwed up when I open them in Word, requiring some low-level repair to display properly.
(Yes, I understand that’s what I get for supporting Microsoft’s unfair business practices and that my life and the world around me would be much improved if everyone used Open Office and Linux.)
The command for splitting tables is not really -under- anything. It’s right there on the Table Layout ribbon, in plain sight. It happens to be grouped with other Split & Merge functions including Split Cells & Merge Cells.
This group, although it contains both Splitting & Merging commands, has the group name, Merge, in a little title bar beneath the actual commands. It would have been more accurate to call it Splitting & Merging but that would have been too long a title and screwed up the spacing.
The reason the group title bars are below the commands, rather than above them, is to break the concept that this is a menu of some sort rather than a grouping of related commands. The group names aren’t important. A user who has read down to the group names has already read & passed over the command he’s looking for.
The point of Start button was not, “Here’s where I turn on my computer” but “Here’s where I start if I want to issue a command (like, open a program or run defrag. Or, yes, shut down windows.)”. But some people found this confusing so MS changed it with Vista, several years ago.
Hahaha. While it’s probably true that the ribbon works better for touch screens than the traditional menus, nobody in their right mind uses a touchscreen for a word processor. The ones that try probably develop severe muscle issues in the first day.
That sounds so much like Emacs it’s not even funny.
Maybe they should have abbreviated it. I might, after having learned where this command is today and if I use it often enough, learn to look for “split” under “merge”. But some text indicator would have helped. It’s much like going to “Start” to stop.
@Superfluous Parentheses: Emacs would have a command shortcut to search commands like “Control-alt-F7, escape-bellybutton, control-escape-search.”
<shrug> If they’d abbreviated it, there’d just be people moaning “How was I supposed to know ‘Spt Mrg’ meant 'Splitting & Merging? I thought it was the Spit Manager!!!”
And again, if you’re reading down to the group title, “Merge”, you’ve already read & skipped over the command “Split Table”. That’s the text indicator, right there in the middle of your screen, the words: “Split Table.”
C-h a, actually 
This is difficult to support, from a productivity viewpoint. Everyone in our office uses Word, but we have nine administrative assistants who need to be able to use the more esoteric features, and they have been trained on 2003 and earlier. Trying to move them over to Office 2007 has posed difficulties beyond what folks experienced moving to 2003. So far, everyone that we’ve tried to make the goat has ended up moving back to 2003, because their workload made it impractical for them to spend time trying to work out where everything is under the new interface.
So what do we do? We’ve already budgeted $25,000 for licensing. We can cough up another $7,000 for advance training for key users who need to use the software hard, whom we can’t afford to have sitting there scratching their heads trying to figure out how to unlock a protected document for editing. …and hope that they’ll agree to take courses on their own time.
No, what we’re going to do is get our greenest AA trained on Office 2007 and comfortable doing all the things she needs to do, and have her prepare a cheat sheet for common (for us) tasks that the other eight can refer to. Maybe phase it in gradually with the others so that she doesn’t get overwhelmed with “Okay, how do I do this, now?!”
Of course you can reorient yourself in anything - but typical users don’t have a surplus of time.
Incremental changes are much better if you want to get any work done. Adobe has done this well with Photoshop – every time I’ve upgraded I’ve been able to continue working without significant interruption for reorientation – even when there are major improvements. Might take a while to get the hang of the new features, it’s not so much like sitting down to learn new a totally new application of the same generic type. The only time I recall such a radical difference between iterations of software was moving from 3D Studio to 3D Studio Max, barely the same product. (Of course, the benefits of 3D Studio Max over 3D Studio were conisderably more tangible, and the differences between the interfaces didn’t seem so arbitrary.)
Sure, even without any training, it’s just going to take a couple weeks of poking around to adjust to a radically different user interface - and since the software is more up-to-date, it’s a safe bet that it’ll generally be a better experience, once you get there.
People who are frustrated with this aren’t necessarily “whiny little bitches,” though - they may just be in the larger category of people who need to get their work done now. Currently, my Office 2007 install is running in a virtualized XP Pro environment under VMWare. When I am not too busy I am trying to get used to it. Office 2003 is still the workhorse, though - at month end I go straight to Excel 2003.
Oh, I already feel like that about their localization. The fuckers use the same shortcuts for different things in different languages. I’ve had jobs where I was using two computers, one with Office in English and one with Office in Spanish. Same edition, they even belonged to the same company. But you know ctrl+b, aye? For bold? Well, in Spanish it reformats the page. So does ctrl+a, although of course in a different way.
If I ever catch hold of the fucker who came up with the idea of localizing the shortcuts, I’ll claim the judge and jury can’t be appropriately be considered my peers unless they’ve had to use Office in a minimum of two languages. No judge or jury who have ever gone through that would consider me guilty.
And I don’t see what’s the relationship between “improving the way we save files, which was about bloody time because the old way blew goats” and “redoing the interface completely in a way that gives people less control over it.”
Someone’s been drinking the Kool-Aid…
I fairly recently semi-hijacked a thread by inserting a bunch of question about upgrading an OLD computer I am currently compelled to use. One of my comments concerned Office2000, which I’m using and someone, I’ve forgotten who made the comment that he/she recently installed Office2007 and intended to scrap it and return to Office2000 ASAP. FWIW and YMMV.
Yes. It’s a callback to the OP’s analogy of the toilet in the living room and chandelier in the closet.
The reason MS didn’t implement the changes gradually is that:
(a) They roll out a new version of Office every few years, so changes would literally take decades; and,
(b) It would be a complete pain in the ass to learn that in Word 2003, “split tables” is
under format>tables>merge>split, then learn in Word 2007 that it’s tables>rows and columns>split then again learn in Word 2011 that tables is only visible when you’re in a table. Essentially, a lot of little changes would have to be learned every iteration rather than learning one massive change for Word 2007.
Obviously, I’m making up where the commands are. I use the ribbon and have no clue where these things actually are.
Finally, to Larry Mudd, you can put commands you use frequently on the quick access bar. It does piss me off that they broke many macros when they changed to 2007. There are tools put together to make regulatory compliance easier that just don’t work on Office 2007.
Sack the lot of them and hire people who are willing to keep their computer skills up to date.
I’m only half kidding. I don’t actually want to sack anybody but ultimately, people who refuse to keep up are shooting themselves in the foot.
And let’s be honest, it’s not like you have to move the state of Nebraska a few inches to the left before you can spot the “Save” command. Take a long lunch and read through the commands on the ribbons then open a few old docs and play around. If you’re paying attention, that’s 95% of all the training right there.
And then if you still have questions, maybe you can search the internet for a helpful message board devoted factual advice and suggestions. Some place where you can get it straight, without feeling like a dope, maybe …
Yeah, that has to be it. It couldn’t possibly be that the whole “click on the Start Menu to turn off your computer” whinging is about as dumb as being confused because you park on your driveway.
As God has intended, at least since Wordstar? Ya’ll can call me an old fart but, at 55, I’m well below the oldest age to have learned Wordstar/Word commands. And thems who are laughing at our Luddite ways will know what we are talking about in five years.
Microsoft and its sheep, in their drive to justify yearly upgrades, forget that their users just want to have their work done by 5PM, and, functionally, there is VERY LITTLE that separates the capabilities of Winword 2.0 and the current version, except file compatibility.
I disagree. As someone who writes a lot of academic papers, the current version of Word has, hands down, the best reference, bibliography and footnotes tools I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Plus the style tools are easier to work with even than Word 2003. The smart art & graphing tools are top notch.
I also really like the new shortcut system with pressing ALT to see the badges then, pressing the appropriate badge. They’ve left the basics alone but the new ALT shortcuts are very easy to pick up.
It’s funny that people who are complaining about having to learn something new are the ones tossing around terms like ‘sheep’ and ‘kool-aid’.
I think we forget sometimes how new this whole computer revolution is - even though of us who were born before it began. In five years, in ten years, who knows what our computers will do. I know not everyone shares my fascination with computers. But like it or not, computer fluency is not something you can learn once and then coast on for thirty years. It may work for you short-term (and honestly, MS doesn’t change yearly) but the rest of the world is not standing still.
Refusing to adapt to new software doesn’t mean it’s the software that’s the problem.
2000, 2003, 2007, 2010. Try every 3 or 4 years.
Those of you who are reluctant to learn anything new may actually believe this. Many of my spreadsheets will not work in Excel 2003 because I use the new features in 2007 (e.g. COUNTIFS, SUMIFS, conditiona formatting). Yes, I realize the initial comment was about Word, not Excel, but it’s all part of the same package.
No, it’s pretty much the jerks who insultingly dismiss the legitimate customer complaints of others that are the problem.
Then buy something else and stop bitching. No one cares.
COUNTIF was available in 2003. It was available in 97. As I recall, it was available in Excel 2.1, way back in the 80s. It was even available in Lotus 123.
We are in that eternal battleground between users and “power” users. The power users want all the bells and whistles. The users want to clock out at 5PM, but are stuck with whatever management is forcing them to use. Not even management, who doesn’t give two shits HOW the work gets done, as long as it’s done. Instead, we are at the mercy of the people in IT who are at the mercy of Microsoft/Autodesk/whoever who is more interested in licence renewals than productivity.
Are you suggesting that making money shouldn’t be their first priority? Where do you work that making money isn’t the priority?
Because my last office manager would only order chickens, so the sacrificegoat command never worked =(
Actually, if they had an option for Shift Interface to Word2003 peopel would have been freaking thrilled/
I had a bought a personal copy before the rest of the people in my office had one to play with, and I detested it. It also sort of did not help that they did not roll it out to everybody, and I was one of the last users to get my laptop shifted over … so for 3 months when my bosses would send out spreadsheets in office 07, i would have to remail them to my home email, run it through 2007 to convert it to 07 and email it back to me. My idiot boss seemed to be too stupid to realize that not every person had 07 yet.:smack: