Regarding M$ Office — and any number of other applications — the following (from a document on “How to Identify an Engineer”) seems appropriate:
To the engineer, all matter in the universe can be placed into one of two categories: (1) things that need to be fixed, and (2) things that will need to be fixed after you’ve had a few minutes to play with them. Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handy, they will create their own. Normal people don’t understand this concept; they believe that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Engineers believe that if it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.
So perhaps the much-maligned Ribbon is an attempt to mitigate the damage they themselves caused.
On the flip side, along with the Ribbon came an expanded context (right-click) menu. This was especially welcome in Excel: I do a lot of work with formulas, and when it comes time to copy the results it’s much easier to right-click the target and select Paste/Values than to go Edit→Paste Special→Values.
Not necessarily. It could also have to do with Microsoft being idiots.
On the other end of the scale, I’ve posted on here before about the online textbook system I was using last year. To log in, you have to select your state from a dropdown, and then select your school from another dropdown.
That second dropdown didn’t contain the list of schools that were subscribed to the system. It contained absolutely every educational institution in the state of Ohio. I highly doubt that, say, Mary’s Friendly Daycare is using any Houghton, Miller, and Harcourt products, but if they ever decide to, well, the listing is there waiting for them. IIRC, there were over 8000 entries in that dropdown list.
Years ago, Lotus 1-2-3 would exit without saving your file or warning you that it was unsaved.
Lotus also shot themselves in the heart by not adapting to Windows. Their Windows version was the same as the DOS version. You couldn’t drag anything or use any of the Windows features. Excel, of course, used them all. Before Windows, Lotus was the best selling software in the world for years and years; but this killed it.
And Lotus decided to get into the word processing world with Lotus Symphony, which was just a Lotus spreadsheet without formulas. Major flop.
There was also Lotus Notes, which confused everyone by calling documents “databases,” even though they were nothing like what people called databases up until then.
Umm, the Lotus word processor was originally called AmiPro and then renamed WordPro. Symphony came along later and I think it was more of an office suite than a standalone word processor, although I never used it.
Hm, I think there are some cases you’ve not considered. For me
personally at least, I find it frequently necessary to review part of a
window’s contents that are distant from where I am presently looking. It
might be further down a Web page, further down a document, further up a
page of source code. By your belief, once I have scrolled down to it,
there is no guaranteed way to return to where I was.
Thanks to Microsoft (or whoever’s idea this was, since Macs tend to
behave the same way), I only need pull the cursor away from the scroll
bar and I am instantly returned to my former position.
True, but Symphony was still a disaster. Their method of integrating the software was to make everything a spreadsheet. Word processing was typing things into cells, one for each paragraph, IIRC.
Oh, that’s awful. Spreadsheets are highly useful and clever little scratchpads but no better suited for word processing than Photoshop is.
I’m not a Lotus person — few Mac-centric people are, after all — but as someone who detests Word and was occasionally using a PC, I developed a mild fondness for AmiPro / WordPro.
Unless, of course, their customers are a captive market created by a combination of unethical and downright illegal business strategies intended to put Microsoft operating systems and applications on every PC. The success of this monopolistic strategy is not a testament to the quality of any software Microsoft produces, beyond the quality of “more or less sort of works most of the time for most users”, which is always deemed to be plenty good enough when you have a captive market.
One program came with installation instructions on paper only. They included words printed in underlined blue saying “Click here”. I tried pressing the words with my index finger, but the paper just slid away from me on the desk. Later, a Doper explained to me that I was supposed to right click.
Another program required a password for installation, and the password printed in the docs had a typo. I don’t for the life of me understand how that didn’t cause a 100% tech service call rate.
For those frustrated with MS Word’s complexity, any love for WIndows Wordpad? A basic usable word processor that’s not trying to be a full desktop publishing/ integrated office suite program.
Others may have already mentioned this, here or elsewhere, but I’ve noticed that Google Sheets doesn’t give you the option to ‘Save/Don’t Save’. In Excel, if I make a significant change but screw something up bigtime (like delete a complex formula), I have the option to revert back to where I started.
Perhaps Sheets has this feature somewhere, but I don’t know about it. That’s a big reason why I don’t use Sheets in favor of Excel.
Right, you don’t have to Save/Don’t Save, everything is always saved. If you are editing a Sheet, click “File->Version History->See version history” and you will get all the older versions of you sheet that you can restore at will. This is equivalent to saying “Don’t Save” and reopening the file.
… and this is pretty much how Excel 365 itself works nowadays. If you’re editing a document that’s stored in OneDrive, Teams or SharePoint, in the desktop version of Excel, there’s an AutoSave option in the upper left. If you turn this on, it will save changes every few keystrokes, and if you mess up you can access the document in the OneDrive (etc.) platform and select from “infinite” backups of the file.
I use it all the time at the office and I’ve found it pretty reliable. If multiple people edit the same document, it gets more complicated, but it never corrupts anything.
MacOS and the banishment of scroll bar arrows. WTF???
You can still have scroll bars (there’s a setting that will quit hiding the damn things and leave them showing fulltime, although it sure isn’t the default). But that’s not particularly relevant.
Open a 290-page document. And let’s say your goal is to position to exactly the end of a certain paragraph after starting a selection elsewhere. So you can shift-click right there and highlight a large block of text. In the old MacOS world, the scroll bar arrows would move the text onscreen in predictably small increments that had nothing to do with how long the total document is. One precise click of the downarrow and an additional single line of text would move into view. But with the arrows gone, you try to drag the stupid little grey “you are here” positioner-thingie inside the scroll bar and it moves you nine or ten lines because your document is large.
There’s supposed to be some keystroke-equivalent that scrolls your document in tiny increments, but believe me, when you’re trying to select a block of text, you don’t particularly want to issue a keystroke and lose your starting position.
The really annoying thing is that nobody 3rd party has managed to figure out how to put the damn things back. I’m very disappointed. Although I suspect I can blame Apple for tightening down the range of things you can modify with 3rd party software.
Sometimes. Such as when superiority drives the price higher than the market will bear, or when stubborn insistence on technical superiority ignores an emerging de facto standard. A great example of the latter is TCP/IP prevailing over ISO/OSI. OSI was technically far superior but far more complicated, and TCP/IP having already established itself as the foundation of Arpanet pretty much killed the competition when Arpanet morphed into what we now call the Internet.
But your cited examples aren’t especially persuasive. If you’re referring to the CBS colour TV system, it was ridiculous because of its dependence on a mechanical colour wheel. As for Betamax, I was an early adopter and still remember my delight at actually being able to record TV shows for the first time. It was definitely superior to VHS. VHS nudged ahead because of initially longer recording time, and then marketing took over when VHS manufacturers started cutting deals with movie producers. I still have one of the last Betamax players and hundreds of tapes, but it’s all packed away and not of much interest in these days of high definition.
Yes. After much research and finding no sane solution exists, I eventually ended up downloading a 99 cent track from iTunes or Music or whatever that was basically just 15 minutes of silence with a name that put it at the front of your playlist alphabetically, whose whole purpose was a hamfisted hack around this behavior. (I tried to do this myself with Audacity, but, for whatever reason, I couldn’t get it to transfer over right.) So now when it wants tries to start blasting the first song on my playlist, it just gets silence.
And the problem was not with Carplay. My main car does not have Carplay, but whenever Bluetooth sensed my iPhone, it wanted to blast tunes.