That Peculiar NonStandard Convention-Violating word processor, Microsoft Word (WTF??)

The BBQ Pit
1

I don’t use Word. On the Mac, the list of word processors I’d use before I’d resort to Word starts with Nisus Writer and AppleWorks, runs through new hopefuls like OpenOffice and MarinerWrite along with yesterday-stalwarts like WordPerfect, MacWrite Pro, and FullWrite, and trails off in the distance with things like NotePad and SimpleText and TeachText .

But it’s always out there and for years it’s been what everyone else uses, and for the most part the stuff I hated was its implementation of features that tend to be unique to each word processor. The basics, the fundamentals that are the same everywhere (not just in word processors but in virtually every program and on both Macs and PCs), were present in Word right where you’d expect them to be. So while I might be clueless if someone asked me how to autogenerate a glossary or put a footnote within an endnote or do a complicated search-and-replace chock full of “if” and “not if” specifications, I tend to assume I “know” Word well enough to handle the elementary basics like how to create a new document, how to close currently open documents, or how to print it out.

So my PC-using girlfriend has recently given up on Lotus WordPro because it seems so buggy under XP, and has installed Office XP. She asks the other day how to print labels to her fancy new label printer and I tell her to just fire up Word, create a new document, go to Print Setup and pick the label printer, type out the label, and print.

She needs help with this, she says. @%@! don’t support friggin’ Pee Cees OK jeez how can you fail to figure this out on your…] WTF???

• There’s no “New” command in the File menu. There’s no “New” command in the File menu. There’s no [::restarts Word::] [::restarts XP::] sonuvabitch, I kid you not, there’s no freakin’ “New” command in the freakin’ File menu. Just isn’t!?!?? Yeah, I finally found a little icon on the button bar (I don’t DO button bars) which creates new blank documents in Word. You have to use that because there’s no “New” command in the File menu.

• You can’t pick the printer in the Print Setup dialog box. [::clicks cancel and tries it again, thinking he picked the wrong menu item::] [::tries all the stupid tabs of the tabbed dialogs, and all the Settings and Setup and Advanced and etc buttons::]. I’m not a Windows person, but last I checked, it was standard on Windows to be able to switch printer drivers from the Print Setup dialog box. Hmm, so what DOES one do on a PC to change printers for Print Setup purposes? This isn’t a Mac, I can’t very well go to the bloody Chooser, now can I? What, you have to change your default printer in Settings\Printers? I know, I’ll go like I’m gonna print, change the printer, then cancel! Boy is this stupid. I just wanted to be able to see the page margins for the label printer’s page def.

• Closing the window throws you out of Word. As the girlfriend keeps a dozen or more open and only semi-saved Word documents open at any given time, this gave me a bad moment [::uhoh, just crashed Word and now she’s gonna kill me if she lost a lot of work::]. But no, Word had not crashed, it was still running 11-some-odd documents in the background, as a quick trip to the Windows task bar showed. But closing one document drops you out of Word and into whatever other program might be running, such as Internet Explorer or Lotus 123 or Eudora. Girlfriend acknowledges situation and says it drives her nuts, because she’ll want to close 5-6 documents consecutively in Word while leaving 2-3 others open and you can’t do it in the normal standard conventional manner any more. What, each Word document now thinks of itself as a damn program? OK, Redmond guys, very funny.

Hey Dooku, are your Office XP colleagues having a meltdown or something? They trying to prove they can be as lackadaisical about interface standards as the open-source community or something? What’s next, they get rid of “Save” and “Copy” and “Paste”?

::shakes head in bewilderment::

Tell me it’s a virus or a corrupt dll file or something - ??

2

Regarding the File menu and the New option - have you tried pulling down to the double arrow-down at the bottom of the menu, and clicking it to show all options? I know that Office 2000, at least, will only show a few options unless you’ve used them in the pulldown menu before, in which case those used options start showing up as well. Sorry if this doesn’t apply to Office XP.

3

Ferret Herder. you’re correct - this does apply to XP as well.

To make labels in Word/Office XP, go to the tools menu, then “Letters and Mailings” and select “Envelopes and labels”.

There are two "X"s in the upper right corner for closing. In XP, the upper one closes Word entirely, the lower one closes only the current document but leaves Word running.

4

Doesn’t do that in her copy. I know the difference between the close-box for document and the close-box for program (the surrounding window). And there are no “extra menu options I’m not showing you” arrows in her File menu – I’m familiar with those things 'cuz I had to navigate them to get to her Start>Programs>Accessories>System>Character Map menu item one day, and she never uses her own Start menu (shortcuts all over the damn place on the Desktop).

So, maybe she has the Economy Edition or something? They couldn’t afford complete menus?

re: labels, I gave up on Word and made her a template in FileMaker. Easier that way anyhow, since her address book is in FileMaker. Gave her two layouts, one for address labels (using existing data fields) and one freehand label layout (global field, type whatever you want and hit Enter to print).

5

The personalized menu thing is one of the most annoying features Microsoft has ever come up with. It’s always the first thing I disable after installing Office. Go to View|Toolbars|Customize, select the Options tab, and check Always show full menus. This should kill it in all Office programs.

Select the printer through File|Print. If you change from the default printer, the Cancel button changes to Close so that you can go back and see what the document looks like using that printer. I think it’s fairly intuitive.

Since Office 2000, each document gets its own button on the taskbar. This can be disabled in Office XP and Excel 2000 (Tools|Options|View|Windows in Taskbar), but AFAIK there’s no way to do it in Word 2000.

6

Yeah, that’s not so bad (I did think of that after a perplexed moment or two), although it does mean you may have to go to the menu twice (once to “not print” to switch printers, then again to do print setup to access printer-specific options). More to the point, isn’t it non-standard? Or are other PC applications following suit?

Number, I am going to try disabling that Views setting, and thanks for the tip!

7

The girlfriend thanks you. (It works, it works!)

8

Moral of the story: don’t rant about a software package just because it’s unfamiliar. I have the same experience when I try to help my neighbors with their Mac - I can never figure out where the application developers have managed to hide the places to accomplish fairly simple tasks. It’s only “intuitive” when it’s what you’re used to!

(And Number, I actually like the personalized menus thing, I suppose because I’m usually doing a limited subset of things, and don’t need to see the long menus. If I do need them, there’s always that little arrow that gets them for me.)

9

I don’t see one single positive aspect to these nonstandard changes. Not one of them makes word processing easier, and every one of them makes it necessary to learn something new just to do the simplest little thing in Word, and every one of them wrecks a convention that otherwise maintained continuity between applications and made the overall computing experience pleasantly dependable.

I’m not saying it’s bad to add a new feature (I love noncontiguous text selection, for instance; I always found it annoying to only be able to select a block of text in its entirety to copy or paste or apply a style to, etc). Nor am I saying that it’s bad to implement a fairly common feature in a new way (being able to speak selected text according to German or Spanish pronunciation rules without having to officially reformat the selection – let alone the whole friggin’ document – as German or Spanish text, is convenient and unobtrusive if you don’t use it; being able to use full-fledged grep as well as conventional Find dialog strings for Find/Replace or Find/Select is powerful if you know how to use it, and again it doesn’t get in your way if you don’t).

But when programmers go off into their own motifs and ignore standards for no particularly good reason, the results are rarely good. I’ve never forgiven Kai’s Power Tools and Bryce for forcing us to learn program-specific metaphors where they could just as easily done things in ways we were accustomed to. Now Microsoft is doing it with a freakin’ word processor. Gimme a break!

10

I don’t want to get you all riled up, AHunter3, but the things you are referring to as “standards” are simply “the way they worked in the old version.”

You claimed that there was no “File/New,” when in fact that’s present in every Office application, though it might be on the full menu instead of the short one, depending upon whether you use it or not.

The method for choosing a different printer falls into the “six of one, half dozen of another” category. The fact that they’ve changed the way it’s done simply means that it’s different now. There certainly is no “standard,” nor has there ever been. And, of course, it’s the same in Word, Excel, etc., so I guess that’s the new “standard.”

The “different window for every open file” now occurs in Word and Excel (I can’t vouch for the others, since I don’t have Office Pro), so it’s “standard” across the package, as far as I can tell. I should add, however, that it doesn’t work quite the same way in Excel as it does in Word, which puzzles me, and is an annoyance. But I think I’ll live.

Now, if they start using CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-Q for “copy,” you’ll have something to complain about!

11

Well, when you consider that this function now allows you to use standard keyboard shortcuts to switch between documents (ALT-TAB) in the same manner you would between any windows, I’m not sure you can accuse them of going off on some unexpected tangent. The interpretation may have surprised you, but it’s certainly based on the “standards” of the day.

BTW, if you really don’t like it… Tools | Options | View; remove the check from the option “Windows in Taskbar”.

Well, the problem really is that you didn’t actually know how to do this. Of course, the idea that there is one standard in how to print out labels is kind of silly. Lotus has two different ways to do it in their word processors: WordPro you have to select “New Document”, then select"Create from SmartMaster", find the labels and make sure everything is set there before ever actually selecting the labels you’re using. While AmiPro has you select “File | New” from the toolbar and pick the label format.
Corel’s WordPerfect, however has you select “Format | Labels” and then select the correct labels to print.
Every word processor has a different way to print labels, there is no standard way to do it. The error was not Microsoft violating the mythical standard, but you exprecting that this would fall into the same category as CTRL-C for copy and CTRL-V for paste.

RTFM

12

Ankh_Too: RTFM

laughing my ass off

applause

13

In his defense, I must say I do spend an annoying amount of reconfiguring win/office 2000/XP “features” to avoid what the folks at Redmond seem to have decided is what the People want as defaults.

(What I’m wondering is who the fuck created Word’s Spanish[Puerto Rico] grammar checker – I’ve dumped it altogether)

14

Well, I’ve used various word processors, and Word is my favorite. So I’m used to how they do things and consider that the “standard”.

The business about different documents=different programs threw me at first, but now I like it. Internet Explorer works the same way, File Explorer works the same way, and it looks to me as if Microsoft is forcing this to be the new standard.

IME teaching folks around my office to use their computers, far more folks know how to use ALT+TAB than know to press CTRL+F6 to switch between different windows. I appreciate this change – it makes for one fewer keyboard shortcut folks need to learn.

I agree that the personalized menus are annoying as hell, but I can see how a newbie user might appreciate them, since there aren’t all those confusing option (“Mail merge? File merge? aaugh!”) Maybe they figure that if you’re advanced enough to use all the options, you’re advanced enough to figure out how to turn off the personalized menus. In any case, I think it’s a poor design decision.

Not as poor, of course, as the decision to have that stupid animated paperclip. I spent about twenty minutes once figuring out how to make it go away, and now it’s the first thing I do whenever I set up a new user’s computer.

I like having the printer option under File–>Print: usually, I’m simply choosing whether or not I want this print job to be in color, and I don’t need to take a second look at it before actually printing it out. By having the printer choice on the same screen that I print from, it saves me a click or two.

Daniel

15

This one’s for the Mac lovers:

www.yocum.org/video/bitch.mpg

(big file, it’ll take a few to load)

16

:slight_smile: keeper!

17

I thought this was going to be about Word’s handling of html documents. :slight_smile:

18

Microsoft in the Pit!

How Novel. :smiley:

19

One of the things we do before starting a new Mac release is look to the WinOffice version and see if there’s anything we like. I can’t begin to tell you how horrified we were when we saw those personalized menus that don’t show every option unless you dbl-click on the Menu item. However, I saw with my own eyes the responses in Usability studies - people really like those personalized menus. I imagine these are the same people that accuse new versions of being “bloatware” with all these new features they don’t need. Still, we decided that it just wasn’t “Mac-like,” which has always been one of our main goals, so we blew it off. We blow off a lot of Win-like things, like their oh-so handy Setup utility. But I digress. :smiley:

In defense of my colleagues on the Win side, I can assure you these kinds of features are not programmer-driven. They come from PMs, who have the usability data backing them up.

I’m glad to hear you got it working. Now use your boyfriend muscle and get her on a Mac!! :smiley: