Post your Office '07/Vista/Explorer 7 tips/questions/gripes here!

In My Humble Opinion
1

In this Pit Thread, the OP (c’est moi) complains about the newest release of Microsoft Office 2007. I’m too lazy to read the thread again, but I’m pretty sure the words “craptitude,” “stinking pile of donkey vomit,” and “die, Bill Gates, DIE!” were used.

Having now used the software for a week, I am prepared to eat crow.

Not the entire bird, mind you. Just the left wing. I still think Office is largely bloatware. I’d have been perfectly happy (and more productive this past week) to stay with Office '03. But the problem with many of the things I complained about is more poor documentation than anything else; there are a number of cool, useful additions to Word, at least (and probably to Excel, etc, as well, though I haven’t had occasion to use that much yet.)

As a mea culpa, I am opening this thread to invite Dopers who have made the move to Office and Vista 2k7 to share the benefit of ther experience with others. Think of it as a GQ thread in reverse: what have you learned about the applications in question that you wish somebody had told you from the get-go? Contrariwse, anybody who has questions is welcome to chime in too.

I’ll start. The three most useful bits of advice I can proffer are thse:

First, to access the help menu using the mouse, click on the blue circle with a question mark inside at the top right corner of the screen.

Second, immediately customize the Quick Access toolbar. This is the row of icons appearing that the top of the screen, above the Ribbon (the extraordinarily stupid and bloated replacement for the menu bar). The problem with the Ribbon is that there’s too many options there, requiring too many mouse clicks to get to what you want; customizing Quick Access lets you avoid a lot of heartache. From what I can see, any Office command can be placed there, and I’ve placed the ones I most frequently used in the order that seems best to me (being able to sort such a toolbar is a definite improvement over Office 2003).

Third, you can specify the default file saving format. I’ve changed mine to Word 97-03, which has made sharing files much easier (read: actually possible).

I’ll post more specific instructions for the above if the thread gets any action. Anybody else?

2

Also Office 07-when you can’t find something, it’s in that bubble in the upper left with the Windows logo. The missing menus are mostly there, and the prefs are on a surprisingly-difficult-for-me-to-see button at he bottom of the pseudo-dialog it opens.

3

That is cool. After you customize that, you can use it to hide the ribbon altogether. Nice.

I only have a demo version so far so it doesn’t have all the functionality, but I can start getting a general idea.

4

You should also move the Quick Access toolbar to below the ribbon after you minimize it, so it doesn’t get in the way of the document title. That was an issue for me, as I put a lot of crap up there (so long as it was crap that I used frequently and which I could identify just from the icon.)

5

I’m still upset at having to switch from WordPerfect several years ago, mostly because I’ve never gotten the hang of tab placement in Word.

But that’s not my problem right now. The default setting at work is 1.5 line spacing, as well as an extra line before and after paragraphs (returns). It takes 1 click on the little paragraph thingie to switch to 1 line spacing and another click to remove the extra line. How can I change the default to 1 line spacing and no extra lines before or after paragraphs?

I do like the 1-click for subscript and superscript. No more going through the font menu!

Also, what are the keystrokes for centering text and left justifying text?

I only use Word a couple hours a week, and I’ve never bothered to learn the shortcuts.

6

Left and right are Ctrl-L and Ctrl-R. Centre is Ctrl-E, of course. What else would it be? :smack:

7

Internet Explorer 7.
Category: Complaint.

What the hell were they smoking the day they designed the user interface; buttons that are different sizes, shapes and styles scattered haphazardly here and there. It’s just painful to look at. A stupid, ugly pudding of a UI.

8

I remember reading a preview document from Microsoft about the ribbon interface and thinking that it sounded like a great idea. But in practice, it just doesn’t seem to work. I always end up clicking on each ribbon in turn until I find (or don’t find) the thing I’m looking for. It doesn’t help that the ribbon names are a mixture of verbs and nouns. Am I looking for an action, or a thing?

9

Thank you!

10

Alrighty, I just this minute found an issue. First, allow me to swear about it:

@^^%^#%^#(^*@#^#%&!!!

Okay.

Footers for my legal documents should look like this:

Title Of Brilliant Document, p. 1 of 12.

AFAICT, in the new Word, I have the choice of a text footer (“Title Of Brilliant Document”) – under the “Footer” button – OR page numbering (“Page 1 of 12”) – under the “Page Number” button. I want BOTH. (And, speaking of BLOAT, I don’t want to have to scroll through sixteen colorful “clip-art” style options to get to the plain text “page X of Y” option.) Every time I put in the document title in the footer and then switch to “page numbers” to add the page numbers, it REPLACES the footer text with the page numbers.

GAH! Og SMASH!!!

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.