Office 2007 [modified]
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John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
I hate the ribbon bar
I minimize it to get back most of the space they stole, and so I don't have to look at it. Now if they only had a "lose the jewel" setting...
Rob Graham wrote:
if they only had a "lose the jewel" setting...
They need to be kicked in them, actually.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
At least in earlier versions of Office, the functionality was still there. In Office 2007, the following functionality has been removed or rendered so difficult to find it's unavailable: - Paragraph formatting. I've spent dozens of clicks trying to find something that just incidentally leads to the paragraph formatting dialog. As it is, what pops up is missing half the tabs of the original. - Table join. Office 2007 'splits' single tables into two adjacent ones on its own for some reason. The command to join adjacent tables is missing. - Document properties. I have yet to find an installation of Office 2007 that displays the document properties panel correctly. - Update field codes. I use a number of templates, all of which use field codes for document properties in the headers and footers. Office 2003 would automatically update these values whenever you created a new document using the template. Office 2007 doesn't have the functionality at all.
Software Zen:
delete this;I admit that I'm not an advanced user of Word. I use it to write simple documents, or edit existing documents. I mostly use Excel to manipulate tabular data, and build time report sheets (I don't trust Microsoft Project which this place uses. It has lost my hours before, so I keep them in my own database, and then sync with the project server when needed). Sure, I've found it hard to find some functions in Office 2007, but I've always had problems with that. It seems that the usability team in Office have ONLY catered to the Clip Art/Birthday Poster crowd, no matter what version.
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John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
I hate the ribbon bar.
But you have to admit that at least the 'live preview' of changes is useful and maybe even cool.
No it isn't. It distracts you from the process of selecting the operation you want to perform. You interrupt choosing what you want, because you're all of a sudden trying to figure out why the spastic P.O.S. is reformatting your document. It's a classic example of piss-poor UI design by juvenile delinquents overly fascinated by the shiny bits.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
I admit that I'm not an advanced user of Word. I use it to write simple documents, or edit existing documents. I mostly use Excel to manipulate tabular data, and build time report sheets (I don't trust Microsoft Project which this place uses. It has lost my hours before, so I keep them in my own database, and then sync with the project server when needed). Sure, I've found it hard to find some functions in Office 2007, but I've always had problems with that. It seems that the usability team in Office have ONLY catered to the Clip Art/Birthday Poster crowd, no matter what version.
As part of my job as Departmental Shit Job Boy, I get to do most of the writing in the group. I write specifications, technical notes on our product for the service organization, and so on. I use Word fairly often. I use templates because so much of the documentation I produce is influenced by our ISO processes that require a specific format.
Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote:
the usability team in Office have ONLY catered to the Clip Art/Birthday Poster crowd
I think you've hit the nail squarely and soundly on the head.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
As part of my job as Departmental Shit Job Boy, I get to do most of the writing in the group. I write specifications, technical notes on our product for the service organization, and so on. I use Word fairly often. I use templates because so much of the documentation I produce is influenced by our ISO processes that require a specific format.
Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote:
the usability team in Office have ONLY catered to the Clip Art/Birthday Poster crowd
I think you've hit the nail squarely and soundly on the head.
Software Zen:
delete this;Have you ever tried Frame Maker? It's got a very steep learning curve, but damn, once you get the hang of it, it's really nice. Then there's LATEX, but that seldom flies outside the walls of academia. Which is a shame, because it's probably the best tool I've ever used for producing documents.
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Have you ever tried Frame Maker? It's got a very steep learning curve, but damn, once you get the hang of it, it's really nice. Then there's LATEX, but that seldom flies outside the walls of academia. Which is a shame, because it's probably the best tool I've ever used for producing documents.
Our Technical Publications department uses Frame Maker. I've read about LATEX before. Both sound like more than I need. I'm seriously considering either reverting to Office 2003 or writing my documentation as HTML. It doesn't matter either way, since I convert the documents to PDF before I publish them anyway.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Our Technical Publications department uses Frame Maker. I've read about LATEX before. Both sound like more than I need. I'm seriously considering either reverting to Office 2003 or writing my documentation as HTML. It doesn't matter either way, since I convert the documents to PDF before I publish them anyway.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary Wheeler wrote:
writing my documentation as HTML. since I convert the documents to PDF before I publish them anyway.
That's the good part about LATEX. It's a markup language, much like HTML, and it can generate a bunch of output types, one of them being PDF. If you ever have the time to play with it, try http://miktex.org/[^]. I'm going back to my old employer in 1.5 weeks. I used to do a lot of the user documentation for our product. If it wasn't for the fact that they are now head hunting for a documenter, I would've rewritten everything in LATEX. I think I will have problems convincing a new hire to ditch everything he/she knows in favor for something seemingly obscure. :~
-- Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit
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I hate the ribbon bar. I hate the schmaltzy semi-background ([EDIT] that mysteriously disappears in the silver theme). I hate the gay light blue theme. I hate it. [EDIT] I found out how to change the gay blue theme to the less gay (but gay nonetheless) black theme. [EDIT] They just revirginized my system here at work, and they gave me Orifice 2007. I hate it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001modified on Tuesday, August 26, 2008 4:18 PM
Bingo ! It sucks. Totally warping the user interface for supposed improved "productivity" is just a disgusting ploy to peddle training and obsolete perfectly functional software. Solidworks did the same thing to their interface. Couldn't be a ploy to sell somebody a $1500 retraining class, now could it ?
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Mark Wallace wrote:
I bought a new machine, which had the full, registered, version of Office 2007 pro installed. [...] I now have an illegal version of Office 2003 on that machine.
AFAIK, there was a MS utility which allowed you to use the classic interface (menus) in Office 2007. Not free, but cheap I think.
Yes, I tried it. It only does the menus, and it was a bit "quirky", so you're still stuck with one non-breaking toolbar, and the ribbon. (And a bunch of dysfunctional shortcut keys) (And the worst Help system since Adobe Framemaker) I'm quite happy, back with Office 2003. After all, it wasn't broken.
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The fact that you know who he is, well...
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary Wheeler wrote:
The fact that you know who he is, well...
The fact that I (not the original target of this statement) know who he is has largely to do with my wife, who loves to see what set of losers will next appear on his show.
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Bassam Saoud wrote:
In my opinion, Office 2007 interface is much more accesible than any other office suite applications.
Yes, and there are people who think that Eclipse is more accessible than VS.
Bassam Saoud wrote:
But anyways cant you change theme back to classic or something?
No, you can't. You're stuck with that damned screen-consuming ribbon, that is not user-configurable, and that contains only what the "geniuses" who invented it think it should contain. I take it you're relatively new to office applications, and that years of experience of using a particular way of doing things (and of using particular toolbar configurations!) aren't relevant to you. Had I wanted to have to re-learn how to create and modify documents, I could have picked up the stupidest of open-source office apps, and learned their way of doing things.
I dunno...I've been using Office since V2.0...they've played with the menus more than once, sending me grumbling to help each time...besides, if you can't handle drastic change, you're in the wrong field.
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I dunno...I've been using Office since V2.0...they've played with the menus more than once, sending me grumbling to help each time...besides, if you can't handle drastic change, you're in the wrong field.
The worst app for menu changes is PaintShop Pro. Mind you, not everyone might notice, because I'm sure they only ever shuffle around the tools that I use most frequently. It's not so much the menus, though; it's the toolbars (and the fact that, up until Word 2003, you could use practically every shortcut-key combination that had been in the prog since Word 2!) I've had two main custom toolbars since Word 2, VB toolbars at the bottom left, and the drawing and borders & shading toolbars floating. Now, instead of having all the tools I use frequently available for single-clicking at all times, I'm expected to hunt for them every time. Most importantly, though, is that I have independent paragraph-style toolbars, that appear according to the template a doc is based on (I type everything in Normal, then arrow down, clicking the paragraph-style buttons to format the text as I go). That incredibly useful functionality (which also does a lot of good for the documents' stability) has been stripped completely from the app. I've only noticed two buttons go missing from the toolbars, over the years. I can't remember the one, but the other (which was, I think, introduced in Word 5) was the sliding zoom arrow thingy. I complained to MS when that vanished, because it was cute. But the ribbon? It' like they decided "Toolbars are great and menus are great -- so let's combine them, because it's Obvious that merging them is the perfect next step!" Sure. Let's take a Koga Miyata and a Maserati, and combine them to make a mode of transport that's only vaguely more usable than an elephant.
