Uh, wow. The newest version of Office is, like, wow.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

So MS gets to decide what’s to my benefit? The corporation that’s attempted to set new records for malfeasance fines worldwide?

Screw them. The simple, plain, obvious fact is that most people don’t use Word for 90% of what it can do. MS just needs to justify releasing new versions. You can already add buttons to the toolbars for your most common actions. MS has developed its way into a corner, as most people just don’t need what they’re selling any more. Hearing all these complaints, I plan on holding onto Office 2003 for about another ten years. What can’t I do? Nothing.

82

I have the full version of Office 97 and 2007 on my computer. for home use, 97 is overkill. The only reason I bought 2007 is because Access stopped working and I can’t get it back up on my computer. In 2007 I’m minimizing the ribbon bar to gain real estate and customizing the Quick Access bar. I like the improvements but as has been discussed, I’m not happy with change for the sake of change. If I wanted to learn to walk again I’d cut my foot off.

83

I agree. I’ve been saying for years that Word has largely outgrown its usefulness. MS is trying to mount a stealth attack on the marketshare that Pagemaker and Quark hold: you could use Word to publish an international edition of the New York Times. Unfortunately they’re going about it so clumsily that all they’ve achieved is the worst of both worlds: it’s too big and unwieldy for home/small-office users, but it’s too Microsofty for Quark and Adobe users.

They need to, at the VERY least, put some kind of Word Basic on the market; maybe call it Letter or something. I’m serious. Actually I just had a brilliant idea: they should make it so that it’s a simple, basic word processor, but have all the bells and whistles that have turned it into a bell-and-whistle graveyard available as components, or modules, to add to the basic program if and when they’re needed. Dang, how much do you think that idea is worth? Billions.

84

Yes they do because it’s their application and they can do whatever they want with it. Don’t like it? Fine, use an old version, but don’t start griping when people send you incompatible formats that don’t work with your outdated version.

Microsoft spent a lot of time and money determining what features most users used and which ones were less used, and that’s how they developed the ribbon. Sure, maybe you’re used to accessing all your favorite functions from endless submenus but guess what? That’s not that intuitive, and it’s a poor design, plain and simple. That’s why they restructured and categorized everything and used the ribbon. It really is more intuitive. If I need a function, all I have to do is “think” about which tab it should be placed on in the ribbon, and 99% of the time it’s there waiting for me to use it.

So for all you stubborn folk refusing to upgrade, I really am wondering why you’re even on a computer in the first place. Every piece of software (and operating system) evolves over time, and refusing to adapt is ultimately only going to result in you being left behind in the dust.

85

How is that different from Wordpad, or Microsoft Works?

86

which would compete against Openoffice which would be tough to do without paying people to use it.

87

This doesn’t really sound all that beneficial - sure, If you only use the basic functions of the application, they’re all there on the ribbon with huge icons, but what are some of the other benefits? I ask because that was your argument earlier in the thread - that this was all to the user’s benefit.

The only benefits you seem to have mentioned so far are:
[ul]
[li]You like the ribbon[/li][li]The benefit of being able to open files in new formats in the future (which would have happened anyway in future versions, if the ribbon was not there)[/li][/ul]

88

That’s a pretty clear description of a tail-wagging-the-dog situation, with a little koolaid imbibage tossed in for good measure.

This is a paradigm that needs shifting. Just because that’s the way things are doesn’t mean it’s the only way to be. Planned obsolescence is planned obsolescence, so matter what the medium.

89

For yuks, I just tried Wordpad (which supports .doc format) to open a massive nasty Word document strewn with hideous formatting, revision tracking, etc. Word will (maybe once every 10 attempts or so) often simply give up and require a task manager kill when it stops responding.

To my surprise, it quickly and easily opened it and was quite readable and uncorrupted, the revision tracking elements came across as strikethroughs.

Somewhat humorously:

Time to open the file in Wordpad: 2 seconds
Time to open the file in Word (2003): 15 seconds

90

One benefit of the ribbon is not having to sift through endless menus and submenus to access various features/functions. This is actually the ribbon’s main advantage – being able to access stuff with fewer mouse clicks. It also provides better categorization for similar functions rather than just a massive number of tiny icons all thrown onto one bar.

As for other benefits of Office '07 in general, there’s the new open-er format, the live preview stuff for formatting, the ease in saving files as PDFs, not to mention it’s more visually appealing. And for those of you whining that the ribbon takes up too much screen space, you need a bigger monitor. What are you running, 800x600 or something?

91

Yes, I always buy software hoping it needs hardware upgrades. :dubious: And there is no such thing as a monitor big enough for Excel.

All the ribbon does is display the same info sideways instead of vertically as a pull down menu. There are still sub-menus to the menus but now it takes up more space so when you click on a new ribbon it takes up the whole screen so there is more mouse travel. That makes it tougher to navigate with a laptop. It’s ergonomically less useful. Some of the changes, such as macro’s, are worse than the older versions (when it works correctly).

92

I’ve been using it over a year and what you’re saying here just does not match my experience - unless you use a fairly small set of functions, there’s no less rummaging around in the ribbon than there ever was in the menus.

We could have had those benefits anyway - with or without the ribbon.

Screen size is not really relevant - the thing just takes up more space than it needs to, and for no particularly good reason.

I guess it boils down to just a matter of taste, but I prefer business applications to stay out of my way and let me work.

93

I guess it’s a matter of taste. Here are some things I do frequently:

In Word, change style. WIth the ribbon, click Home tab, click to open styles, select style. With 2003, click on the styles dropdown from toolbar and pick the style.

In Word, change paragraph spacing. WIth the ribbon, learning curve problem. Click tabs until you discover that Paragraph is on the Home tab. Stare and try different things until you figure out that that little arrow in the bottom right corner of the block will open a submenu, the old familiar Paragraph menu. Iterate a few times until you finally remember this.

In Excel, you want to insert a row. So you go to the Insert tab. No way to insert a row. You finally find another Insert on the Home tab, which turns out to be for inserting worksheets, rows, columns, cells.

In Excel, you want to select a graphical object. In 2003 you click on the arrow cursor icon on the Drawing toolbar then select. In the ribbon, you click on every tab looking for an arrow cursor icon. Not there. Days later, by accident, you happen to discover that in the Home tab, in the Editing block, there is a “Find and Select” button (picture of binoculars), which you never found before because you were using CTRL-F for Find. An item in that submenu has the arrow icon that lets you “select objects.” Try to remember again days later.

In Excel, you want to Insert a Function. In 2003 you select Insert, Function. In the Ribbon, you go to the Insert tab and find everything but functions. After an exhaustive search of every tab, you find Insert Function under the Formula tab.

In Excel, record a macro. In 2003, Tools, Macros, Record. In the ribbon, try the Developer tab, since macros generate code. Nope. Try everything else until you find Macros under the View tab. View? VIEW?!?

Everything I could do in 2003 with one or two clicks from toolbars take at best the same number of clicks and often one additional click in the ribbon.

On the plus side Excel finally has more than a pallette of 40 colors to choose from. Charts look slicker. Conditional formatting is more sophisticated. All desirable but really just bells and whistles.

94

As a PPT power user, who uses it to–get this–design slide shows using spreadsheet data–it’s infuriating and insane that you can’t format a master color scheme to work in Excel and PPT concurrently, and you can’t easily format a chart as a graphic object–because after all, a chart is a fucking graphic object–once it’s on a PPT slide.

This seems to fly full in the face of what the fucking program is for.

95

Dude, I know you work for Microsoft, but do you have to be so defensive about it. I have upgraded. Here is a newsflash, Microsoft was wrong not to include and option to flip back to classic menus. They have made many mistakes, this was yet another. The Toolbars were extremely customizable. I rarely needed to use the menus at all. The ribbon waste space (minor) and cannot be customized. This means for many people it is not better. Simple.

Your post by the way comes off extremely condescending.

96

Recording a macro use to give a floating button to stop recording. Now you have to go back to view, then the macro pull down button and then stop macro. It’s not the end of the world but I paid money to relearn how to use something that takes more time and is less customizable. The ideal situation would have been to dedicate more programing time to new features.

Jeeze aloo, it’s bad enough that we’re all unpaid BETA testers, we shouldn’t have to do the focus group work too.

97

Yes, it’s their application, but they decided to make in incompatible with previous versions. That’s unconscionable. They decided that people couldn’t just go back to the old way that they knew. That’s just dictatorial. They also decided to make the Win 7 upgrade not work with XP, even though they knew that there were billions (with a B!!) of computers out there still using XP. Oh, they couldn’t manage that? Bollocks. They can program an entire operating system and what, hundreds of apps, but they couldn’t figure that out? It’s greed. G-R-E-E-D.

I truly believe that one of the reasons that Bill Gates is giving away so much of his money (good for him, such as it is) is that he has guilt over his business practices.

Oh, I will remind Sir that MS Word still carries a legacy help for the Word Perfect user. They can manage that, but not for the Office 2003 user?

98

This is a really peculiar thing - back in the 90s (I think it was), we started seeing lots of third party apps that were ‘skinnable’ - typically, even the most vanilla of skins for these would be something at least slightly out of the ordinary in its control set - they collectively had a ‘look’ about them that identified them as skinnable apps at the very first glance.

And this is the second time* (in my experience - maybe there are more) that MS has revamped an application in such a way that it resembles one of those skinnable apps, but is in fact quite the opposite in terms of configurability.

*(the other one is IE7+ - the interface is a complete dogs dinner - it looks like it should be customisable, but pretty much aside from hiding and showing things, it isn’t)

It smacks of ‘we know what our users want better than they do’ (which, before anyone picks me up on, I should point out cannot really be true if it is also true that most people are unreasonably resistant to change)

99

Change itself is not bad. Change for the sake of change, just to have a new version to sell, is bad.

Office is a productivity tool. If people are to be productive the changes need to be evolutionary, not revolutionary. It’s always Microsoft’s thing to make the user interface guidlines and then break them.

100

:rolleyes: I don’t work for Microsoft, but it does tick me off that 3 years after this program was released, people are still whining about a few of their icons being in different places. Sure, maybe Microsoft was in the wrong by not making the ribbons customizable straight out of the box, but that will be fixed in Office 2010. And not to mention you can minimize the ribbon completely in two clicks. And that’s not even mentioning how easy it is to indeed customize the Quick Access toolbar at the very top of the screen for people who really want their custom toolbars back.

:dubious: It’s completely compatible with older versions. It’s why there’s a “Save as Office '97-03” button in every Office '07 app. It’s why they have free converters on their site for older versions to open new versions. You can’t expect an office suite to keep the exact same file format indefinitely, especially when they’ve developed a superior one.

And Windows XP is approaching 10 years old. So a bunch of people read the nonsense online about Vista being terrible and neglected to upgrade. To my knowledge, not even Mac OS lets you skip a major OS release and still upgrade.

See, that’s the problem, they didn’t change Office just for the sake of change. There’s a ton of new features. You people are acting like all the programs’ changes are cosmetic, and while a lot of them are, that’s what’s expected when a product reaches maturity and there are fewer innovations to include.