You said:
I was taking your word for it.
If you want to take a “just following orders” tack now, that’s fine.
At work, like I said earlier, we had 2007 pushed via the networks. What we found was, there APPARENTLY was insufficient attention paid to backward compatibility. Files written in the previous version of Office were (for example) mdb (or is it accdbx) or doc files. In 2007 the computer “wants to see” docx and mdbx files. Our agency runs a fairly large (by our standards) database. When 2007 hit, everything went to shit. The database did not run properly (when it ran at all, and that was pretty random). We are still having random problems with it. Macros didn’t work all the time. The data files got corrupted repeatedly. The relational links between mdb files was fucked. The main mdb file (our “doorway” or “entry point”) keeps growing for no apparent reason, even though it is just made up of screens, buttons, queries. We had to deal with a whole new “trusted site” problem, just to get our people back online with it. It seemed like a perfect storm of “oh fuck”. Our Word files seem to be OK, but maybe we just got lucky there.
AND of course, nobody knew a damn thing about how to fix it.
I don’t know what the concept of “useability” is in MicrosoftLand, but the first thing is to be able to use the programs. I don’t care about programming the ribbon (been there done that) and I don’t care about how many shades of red magenta puce puke I can have, I just want programs that do what I tell them to do, when I tell them to. And I hate having to take down a database and field all sorts of phone calls, just because the latest “improvement” once again rendered our files useless. that means more work for me.
Stability trumps fancy bells and whistles. Backward compatibility trumps pretty colors.
And now, to look at a Snapshot file, we have to download a viewer. Never mind we could read a Snapshot file before.
Office 2007 is shit. I don’t care how you polish the turd, it is still a turd.
I wasn’t taking it then either, but I can see how you read it that way.
Oh God yes! So far every time I’ve tried to use the Help feature in Word 2008, it has come up with nothing in response to my query. Absolutely nothing! Using the exact same prompts in the Help feature on my PC at work (which is running Word 2004 for Windows), I get useful information. I really pity anyone who’s new to Word who tries to use the program’s help feature to try to find information on how to change settings in the program; they’re going to get very frustrated very quickly.
I suspect that’s true for 90% of users - and the other 10% only want the fancier features occasionally. So the fancier features do need to be there, and be supported - just not in ways that make doing the basic stuff more cumbersome.
smacks Paperclip
Although at least that damned annoying Paperclip did occasionally offer the user useful information (unlike the current Word 2008 help system, which is basically useless).
I type faster than most, and whenever possible, don’t watch what I’m typing. Basically, no one will take notes at any meetings, so I type things down while having conversations with people. I need the word processing app to be completely predictable, with no warning dialogs or ambiguity over which key combination will do what function.
So I use Notepad about 80% of the time, and Visual Studio about 10% of the time. When I send out a Word document, I just copy and paste from my notes. In fact, I always leave a Notepad window open so I can copy text from Word documents and web pages, paste it and remove all formatting, and then copy from Notepad back into whatever it is I’m working on. The reason I use Visual Studio is because it has a “search in files” function that actually works, whereas the “find” function in Windows Explorer (both XP and Vista) suck. Also, you can drag a text document onto the Visual Studio editor window and it’ll open the file, not attempt to insert the contents of the file into whatever file you’re editing. (I hate that). You know what? Screw it; I just want emacs and grep. You kids get off my lawn.
I still use Office 2003 at home on my Macs, but received Office 2007 for the Mac from a friend (who buys at the Microsoft company store), so when I bought a newer Mac this year, I installed it on that machine. It doesn’t totally suck,** so that’s good, I guess. Office 2003 is fine, even though it runs under the PPC emulator in the Intel Macs.
(** “It still doesn’t suck.” is the tag-line for a highly regarded Mac text editor, BBEdit.)
If you installed Office 2007 on a Macintosh OS you’re pretty tech savvy.
How is it Microsoft’s fault that your IT people didn’t do sufficient testing before pushing out software on mission-critical systems?
I LOL’d. My first thought upon reading that guy’s rant was “Dumbass user + shitty IT staff”.