As a change from the American Presidential Election and its attendant issues:
I pit Microsoft. Office 2007, in particular.
I know this is old hat but if I don’t publicly shriek in outrage and horror I’m going to 'splode.
I don’t even know where to start. I’ve used Word since it first appeared on a computer screen and now. * Now* some dork somewhere thought I’d like little pictures to show me howta use Word. I will hunt down and beat that dork to death with my failed C drive.
I’m not feeling better yet.
Maybe I should start ranting about Quickbooks Pro and its little pictures meant to show idiots like me how to use a program I’ve been using for 10 years. Maybe I should just go jump off a bloody bridge and get it over with.
Why is it necessary to “new and improve” something that worked just fine as it was? I don’t want an April Fresh version of Word, I don’t want Newer Quicker anything. I’m old and I like things to stay the same.
At least my new computer has Windows XP. One experience with Vista is probably what caused the nervous breakdown that caused me to post this.
I haven’t used the new Word enough to know whether I hate it as much as the old Word, but I can share a random fact I discovered today:
Y’know how everything typeset in Word looks like dogshit? That’s because it doesn’t do kerning by default (or decent justification, or any of those things that have made typography not shit for the last umpteen years, but that’s by the by). Anyway, the random fact is that it actually does support proper kerning, it just doesn’t enable it. If you open a new document, right click and select Font…, then choose the Character Spacing tab, and check “Kerning for Fonts”, setting it to something like 8 points and above, then click the “Default” button, all of your documents will magically look much, much better (assuming you’re using a font with proper kerning tables; the new Office fonts such as Calibri and Cambria have these).
That this isn’t enabled by default is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Stupider than Clippy, even.
Oh, and here’s how to massively improve the justification (by making it emulate a 12-year-old word processor).
This still won’t prevent Word being a complete pile of shit, but it will at least make your documents look a little bit less like they were typeset by a blindfolded toddler using fridge magnets and a sledgehammer.
I’ve been mad at them ever since they retired FrontPage and replaced it with Sharepoint Designer. I don’t know if that was part of the Office 2007 initiative or not.
Now, instead of editing sharepoint pages in real time on my laptop, it feels like I’m exporting code to a server somewhere on the far side of Pluto via 28.8 Kbps analog modem. It has the look and sluggish feel of a web interface instead of a console. I hate when they take perfectly functional desktop applications and turn them into cloud computing nightmares.
Because Microsoft wants to make money. Most office packages reached peak usability years ago, but without the income from people buying new versions any company that makes such a product would swiftly go broke. Microsoft aren’t evil or even exceptional in this regard. I suspect eventually all these products will move from up front costs to yearly license fees with upgrades part of the deal.
My recommendation when people ask me about upgrading to new versions of products they use is always “Don’t unless it has specific features that you have researched ahead of time and know will help you”. If you still have the disks for an older version, why not just revert?
That’s a useful tip about the kerning there Dead Badger, thanks
Ugh, you picked a good time for this one. I’ve just had to install SP3 for XP on my laptop, which it had been bugging me about for over a month. Then, today everything gets slow, so I pull up the Task Manager to see what the hell is going on, and the wuauclt.exe is not only running two instances, but one of them is fucking hogging my goddamn box. Fine, FINE, I get the picture, you want me to install the damn thing. It took right about an hour, right during the time that I wanted to be doing work, but couldn’t either way (If I’d have left it, it would have kept running SLLLLOOOOOOWWW and re-drawing my mouse every 5 seconds instead of instantly).
I’ve got Office 07 on this box as well (cause I got it dirt cheap, and figured that I might as well…). Aside from a fairly slow load, once it is up and running it works fine.
It wouldn’t be a Microsoft product if it didn’t make you want to chuck your computer out a window at least once a month, after all.
Oh yeah, I really hate the idea of “cloud computing.” I have real problems with connectivity, and having everything up in the “cloud” totally sucks ass when you’ve got no net connection, as I sometimes do. When you have multiple options to connect to the net, its fine, because if one goes out, you can simply switch to another one, but when you’re limited to just one ISP and your connection goes out, you’re fucked.
I had a complete and utter failure of my old computer, lost my C drive and maybe my D drive. It’s all in at the Geek Squad right now. I can’t believe how stupid I was, I hadn’t backed up some really important data - personal stuff but awfully important to me. I am optimistic that I will get it back.
But, when I had to buy a new computer, I thought, what the hell, I’ll get the updated Office and Quickbooks. I have the new Quickbooks on another computer where I keep books for a baseball league - and so I have some useful familiarity with it. I hate it, but I’m getting used to it.
I know they have to keep updating so people have to keep buying, but it sux just the same. Time for something really radical now. A computer that will transport me to the Moon or something of that nature.
This is the obligatory “I like the flamed product” post.
I love Word Perfect, but nobody uses it. I don’t want to pay for Word, so I used Open Office through college and for personal use afterward. When I got my current job, I got a new computer with Office 2007, and I like it.
I don’t know where any of the functions I need in Office XP are. They seem unintuative and hard to find. In Office 2007, they may not always be in the first place I look, but the help is helpful (usually) and I can put them on a custom bar if I want to. 95% of the functions I use are on three bars, as opposed to the old drop down menus where I had to hunt for everything.
I’m not an advanced user, only a typical officeplace user. My company has the templates with styles already defined, so I don’t have to monkey with that stuff. Maybe you do.
Still, for the love of Og, MS needs to add something equivalent to Word Perfect’s reveal codes function.
I don’t have the new office, but it bugs the hell out of me that MS decided to change the file extension to .docx and not make it backward compatible. Not only doesn’t my 2000 version of word recognize it, removing the x doesn’t help at all. Lotsa frustrated students have to re-send me the document in question after deadline, even though I point out in instructions that they have to save in an older format.
And since most of them are numbnuts in the first place, they haven’t enabled “show file extensions for known file types”.
ETA: How many Word users could really get along with WordPad? Most people use it as a typewriter anyway and of the few that actually use the word processing functions, most of *those *are really engaging in typographic masturbation.
Well, no, it wouldn’t; the file extension is just a clue to what’s inside. The format is completely different internally.
Anyway, Microsoft published a free compatibility pack that will allow anything from Office 2000 onwards to read the new formats. It’s available here. Install it and you should be able to open .docx just fine.
What can you say about a bunch of racketeers? You can like or hate the software, but nobody really debates the ‘morals’ of the company anymore. Money talks and a win is a win, no matter what you have to do to get there.
So kick 'em in the shins whenever you can. I use ASCII text files whenever possible. For more complex stuff I luvs me some Linux with a side of Open Office. It really is worth the extra trouble.
I very rarely use Office, but the limited menus annoy me greatly. I want all the options, all the time. I don’t want it to take two clicks to see the entirety of every pull-down menu. Leave it to MS to set the Windows standard and then break it.
Ah; your problem is a shit IT department, then, not Microsoft. Commiserations; there’s nothing worse than an IT department who views its role as preventing users from getting access to anything newer than an Apricot. Can’t you request the compatibility pack, though, if it’s causing you obvious work problems?
control-z, you can turn off the expanding menus, too (which I agree are an awful idea). Tools > Customize > Always show full menu.
Openoffice is just as bad, incidentally (although I suppose being free makes it somewhat more forgivable). They even re-implemented Clippy. Fucking Clippy. The most derided feature in the entire history of software, and they fucking copied it. That tells you everything you need to know about OO, as far as I can see.
LaTeX is the only way forward if you want documents that don’t look like you shat them. Especially now XeTeX supports modern fonts without hassle. If only it didn’t have a learning curve like the Matterhorn.
To the OP - what are you trying to accomplish that is more difficult in the new Word than in the older versions? Just asking because I’m assuming it’s not just the new icons that is causing your distress…
And I know where he lives.
He dies all over again on every new box I touch.
My friends think it’s odd, but they know better than to interfere.
And yeah, I know Open Office can be nearly as obnoxious. But as you mentioned, that free thing really takes the sting out of it. That’s right in the middle of my price range.
That’s the problem with Office 2007. From what I’ve heard, if you’ve never used office before, it’s wonderful and intuitive and easy to figure out.
But for those of us who slogged through years of figuring out how to make Word (or Excel or PowerPoint or whatever) work, nothing is where it belongs. And I can’t seem to do the things I used to do and I’m not sure if that’s because the function no longer exists or if it’s because it’s now hidden in a place that I can’t find it. And I hate the new “help.” It isn’t helpful at all.
I do agree with you about reveal codes. The “¶” button isn’t even close.
ugh I hate microsoft, so I’m with you guys on this.
The other night I spent a good hour making up a worksheet in Excel so I could send it to work and not have to worry about throwing one together in the morning before my class.
I run OS X at home and only got Office Mac or whatever it’s called (I have the latest version) to save myself the hassle of having to do everything at work on the Excel I have there.
Of course, I get to work and try and open the damn Excel file on my old-ass computer and it refuses to do anything with it. Gods damn you, MS, is it really that hard to make something work on multiple platforms? Every other freakin OS can do it, why can’t you?!
No, it’s not just the new icons, it’s the hidden icons. WTF? I thought that little jobby up there in the left corner was just, you know, a logo. It’s absurd. I will likely die in an apopleptic (sp?) fit if I carry on with this so I will not carry on.
I will get over my pique. I know I will. But mostly what I want is my data. The Great Canadian Novel is on that failed drive.
No one needs to smack me around for failing to do more frequent backups. I cringe in shame whenever it comes into my mind.
