Wordstar did hanging indent, but not until 1987. In 64 kilobytes, including both the program and your document. 
I use Word 2003 at work right now. I have made a bunch of templates that contain lots of VB 6 code. When my work upgrades to Word 2007, will these templates work?
[quote=“Merneith, post:69, topic:522372”]
Amerone and I have already mentioned things we can do with the new version that the older versions don’t do. I can probably google up a full list for you for Office, Vista & Win7 too, if you want.
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No need my dear smarmy bitch. I am rather finely informed
My business is my business, but it’s not fucking widgets. My industry is one of the leading consumers of IT globally in fact.
Yeah, the software can do some extra silly bells and whistles.
The added value of those extra silly bells and whistles relative to the transitioning costs I see is negative.
I have plenty of clients that are still in Word 97 or whatever the prior generation is.
Just because smarmy MS brainwashed Americans may jump doesn’t mean the rest of the world transitions like bloody lemmings.
PRETTY FUCKING SIMPLE, THE CUSTOMISABLE INTERFACE, OLD MENU SYSTEM AVAILABILITY.
Users can flip and transition at own speed, or naturally allow the menus to die out - if in fact they do die out or rather if MS doesn’t have to backtrack.
Ribbon can be a fine little option.
You begin with the presumption that there is value in using their pointless fucking ribbon.
And that this magical New Way is an advantage.
Your smarmy continued assertion that one method is “outdated” has no bearing on my and other firms analysis this is more pain than the presumptive gain.
Yes “objectively” they added more features while not addressing speed or memory bloat. Big fucking deal.
No my dear stupid bitch, it’s not about “not trying new things” - we’re not in bloody school, it’s about focusing on where added value is.
You smarmy conceit about not updating computer skills is typically academic. We have massive spend on computer skills where there is added value to the business.
World Processing is not “new computer skills”
World War III, if it happens, will arise from a violent disagreement over the placement of menu options in a word processing application.
Them’s fightin’ words, suh!
My take on Word 2007:
I run the word processing department for a large New York law firm. I probably know Word as well as anyone on the planet.
We have not upgraded to 2007. Mostly because the learning curve that will be required of our staff will be an expensive nightmare (excepting the word processing staff, who actually think that kind of thing is fun). I’ve been fooling around with it just so I’m ready when the inevitable comes, but I’m not ready to call myself an expert.
That said, 2007 has some new functionality. Most of that new stuff will not be useful to the run-of-the-mill user (not that that means it isn’t useful – just that it won’t be worth the effort of learning the new interface for most). The interface is a fucking nightmare. Excuse my language, but I am baffled by Microsoft’s decision to radically change what is one of the most familiar interfaces in existence. Surely new functionality could have been included in Word without making it look and feel like an entirely different program.
The jury (well, if the jury consists of just me) is still out on the .docx format.
It annoyed me for a while. Then I learned the new system, which is really not all that different from the old one, and now I don’t care anymore.
See, I’m capable of something called “learning”.
Yes, but you don’t have to train around 150 secretaries, many of whom are highly resistant to learning anything new, and are in fact convinced that if they refuse to learn, they won’t have to do the work.
I would make that conviction come true: their replacements will do the work.
See, I live for that sort of thing. Been training current and would-be office professionals since WIN 3.1 days. I’m awfully good at helping highly intimidated/frightened people overcome that resistance to the new and rarely have I ever had to use the threat of potential job loss as the carrot. You’d be surprised how quickly people can pick new software up once they realize it’s the only way forward. In my experience, people who cannot or will not make the change usually leave of their own volition because they can’t stand the pressure.
In 2007 I was part of a massive retraining initiative with 500+ medical staff who had been using a DOS-based clinic appointment system (many of them for the entire 18 years since it was implemented). We taught them the brand-new turnkey GUI program in TWO DAYS. I’d say a third of 'em were scared shitless, another third were just very worried, and the other third were younger and fresh out of college, so they were mostly OK. After the training ended and the system went live, the healthcare company lost fewer than 7% of their staff within the first two months; somewhat lower than the 20% they were predicting based on similar situations at other companies of the same size. I credit that low attrition rate in no small part to the training (and our in-person support after go-live) and our ability to make the intimidating seem straightforward.
If someone’s in a situation similar to Saintly Loser’s above and you’re in the DC/NoVA area, shoot me a message, 'cause I’m your gal.
But there are only a finite amount of minutes in a human life, which can be spent more productively doing almost anything than re-learning a basic word processing program.
In this case, the secretaries get more productivity done in the short term and do not have to relearn their muscle memory and the office saves upgrade money, win win.
And I suppose this represents some major marketing coup for microsoft.
It’s not like they rewrote the program in Klingon. It’s really not all that different. Spend 15 minutes looking at it, and you’ve got it.
Do I understand correctly that you’re saying companies typically lose 20% of staff when that staff has to learn new software?!
I wouldn’t call it “lose”, because really, how productive could they be if they refuse to learn something useless? That’s why my company is rolling out mandatory Ancient Etruscan training for all employees: the few who will survive will be the truly hard core workers.
One could make the argument that at the 50000 foot level, changes like this cause the nations economy to decline due to otherwise enormously productive employees losing their jobs and being replaced by people without those specialized skills, but I call it social darwinism in action.
The point of my repeated Wordstar references is that word processing software is a MATURE technology. Anything changed or added to it is either change so that a company can sell more copies or a nuanced change that most users will find pointless. It’s like changing the color of the grip on a hammer: most people would not care and would find the promoters of such a change useless idiots.
Word has been a hammer since Winword 2.0. Subsequent changes have mostly been to enrich Microsoft.
It took me all of 10 minutes to find all the features in Word 2007 that I needed to write my papers and do all the things I need it to do for work. Same for Excel, Access, and Powerpoint. Now I prefer it, since the different ribbons are like different modes: one for writing the paper, another for formatting it, another for the citations, etc.
Anyone complaining that all their people need to be retrained to use it is either lazy themselves, has lazy employees, or both. It just ain’t that hard, people.
I am currently finalizing my death pool list on my wife’s laptop which only has Excel 2003. I have not used 2003 for a year or so. I have come across things I never realized were new in 2007 but I now accept as normal. Sorting is easier in 2007. I wanted to select my top 13 picks, and selected rows expecting the status bar to show me how many rows I had selected. Nope - must be new in 2007. So is showing the average of the selected cells. And I wanted to increase the size of the display using the slider in the status bar. Nope - that’s not there either.
Yes, learning 2007 was a bit of a pain, but no way would I go back - I would lose too much function that I am now used to. Maybe the new function could have been added without the GUI changes, but I like both the new GUI and the extra function.
This is true. And while it may be a plus for you, it can be a headache for others. I’ll go into more detail tomorrow, because this is an interesting topic (in fact, I think I’ll start a non-Pit thread), but right now my hand is in excruciating pain because I have a broken knuckle and no painkillers. No more typing for me.
If you’re interested in a non-Pit thread, I’d be willing to contribute. I do enjoy interface design and discussing it. Here’s some linkage to get us started:
Paul Thurott:
Inside Office 12 (January, 2006)
Microsoft Office 2007 Review Part 2: What’s New?
Thurott’s a Microsoft apologist (for reals, not just because internet loudmouths are calling him names) but he’s on a first name basis with the developers and has been following this closely for a long time.
In those links, Thurrot discusses how the old menu interface of 2003 was becoming bogged down. New features were being added to the existing Office menu designed for Office 6 and the result was a proliferation of menu items. Office 2003 tried to address this with an inconsistent side bar. When faced with adding more abilities in 2007, and with the knowledge that people were already unable to find exisiting abilities, MS implemented the Ribbon interface to make the expanding capabilities of Office more accessible since it makes the commands visible rather than residing three submenus down.
Jakob Nielson:
Summary of 10 Best Application Design UI Competition (August, 2008)
Nielson primarily focuses on website UI design but the line between that and stand-alone application design is blurring.
In the contest (from the Usability Week conference, 2008) Nielson summarizes the full report (pdf, $125, available at that link) and points out that some of the winning UI’s are starting to adopt the Ribbon approach. As he puts it, the Ribbon is an example of giving people what the need (improved access to all the many commands of Office 2007) instead of what they want (the old familiar.)
That second link there is basically an op-ed, but Nielson starts by pointing out that workers who learn one version of one piece of software don’t really have computer skills. It’s an interesting read, I think, and it’s applicable here (although it’s obviously not proof of anything but his opinion.) Nielson posits that actual computer skills (and people who will be at an advantage in the job market) will involve basics like knowing how search, knowing how to present information online and so on, rather than learning say, Secrets of Excel 2000. The computer field moves on but problem-solving skills will always be useful.
OpenOffice will be switching to a Ribbon-type interface in the next major iteration. The design team posted about their experience with what they’re calling the Renaissance Project.
Here’s an example with a screenshot - Example
Here’s a FAQ about it - FAQ
at the first link above, there’s a powerpoint thing from their July 2009 meeting with more and more elaborate screenshots.
One of the main goals of this Renaissance version is to provide a more streamlined experience with the increasing capabilites of OpenOffice. Through testing and prototyping, they found this Ribbon-ish arrangement allowed them to provide access to more items, in a more obvious manner.
I guess I’ll stop for a while now. It’s an interesting subject, I think.
I want to address this, because it’s at the heart of some of the disagreement.
Here, for the curious, is the Wordstar for Dos command list:
http://www.wordstar.org/wsdos/kb/Q2002.htm
That’s it. Command line text-editing. And here’s what it looked like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wordstar.gif
It doesn’t have mouse support.
It doesn’t have a graphical user interface.
It doesn’ supply visual feedback
No images
No graphs
No styles for formating
No commenting
No proofing & tracking changes
No version control
No connection with a spreadsheet or presentation program
No internet publishing
No email support
No flowcharts
No automatic bibliography/footnotes/end notes
No tables
No macros
No find & replace
No hyperlinks
No spellcheck or thesaurus
No special print abilities, like multiple copies or collation
And that’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there’s more.
Don’t get me wrong - it was hot stuff in 1983. It was a legitimately important piece of small business software. I didn’t use it myself, but I used it’s successor, Word Perfect for DOS, until I switched to Word 6 and it’s sexay GUI. Later addon programs had things like a spellcheck.
But bottom line: it’s Notepad, without a mouse, and less functionality.
Word processing may have begun in the 80’s but it didn’t end there. It’s true that DOS era software can do the basics of what we require in modern usage. But that’s it - the basics. It’s simply incorrect to say that everything which happened in word processor development is unnecessary or irrelevant. As the list of what we need to do grows, so does the complexity of the interface required to manage them.
Getting back to the OP, I would point out that those of us from the DOS era have already made a bigger adjustment than going from Office 2003 menus to the 2007 Ribbon. It would be silly to assume that this is the last time we’ll have to make such a jump. The personal computing era is only 30 years old. I suspect the next big interface jump will happen as computing increasingly takes place on non-traditional monitor surfaces. It will do things we don’t even know we want. Don’t assume that if you just learn the Ribbon, you’ll never need to know anything else.