Philocthetes

Join Date 10/2003

+153

It's a feature, not a bug

I was just typing about the TA tech cost thing, and found myself wanting to rant about the painful irony that in software, one person's feature can often be another person's bug.

I'd love to hear from you heavy PC users about the "new and improved" OS and application features that have driven you crazy for whatever reason. I also invite mockery or constructive critique of the following rant:

My current favorite whipping boy is Office 12 in general, the ribbon in particular. I've been a serious Word user since GUIs were new and amazing and most folks bought standalone Office apps, not a "productivity suite."

I can touch type at a decent speed and until now, even through the travesty that was Office 11, I was able to recover from an upgrade pretty quickly and get back to my usual ability to whip through Office tasks at a pace I felt justified my respectable hourly billing rate.

Please, please, let there be a service pack that adds a "Use Classic Office interface" option. I want my custom toolbars and menus back and I don't want an interface that assumes I'm scared of the keyboard.

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Well, I always said: The newest Office was developed with XBox controllers in mind.

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Yea the new microsoft office REALLY SUCKS! I know how to make powerpoints, I've made brilliant ones in the past, but I can't figure out how to navigate in the new 2008 powerpoint. The ribbon is suppose to help you find stuff? Oh like the neat and organized drop-down menu was a blackmark on microsoft sooooo much that they needed to change it!

Please, please, let there be a service pack that adds a "Use Classic Office interface" option. I want my custom toolbars and menus back and I don't want an interface that assumes I'm scared of the keyboard.

I agree 100%. Give us a freakin' option! It wouldn't be bad if they said: "We have a new system that we think is better. However, many still like the old system so we will let the user decide.
Instead they say: "This is our new system. It's better because we made it. Want your old interface back? Well go *uck your self then."

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Achronous

Join Date 03/2006

+29

You could just not upgrade... The ribbon is aimed to make new users use commonly needed features without digging too much. If you stop resisting change for the sake of change then you might find something you like

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You could just not upgrade...

Sometimes, it's not your decision if you work in an office. In any case, the ribbon is there to make Office (Excel in my case, not Word) forward (Vista) compatible, not backward (XP) compatible. Any power user of Microsoft products should know by now that Microsoft is always promoting the next big thing, not the last big thing. I wasn't a fan of the ribbon, either, when I was first upgraded to Excel 2007 (been a user since 1995), and there are still some things I don't like. But after about a week of figuring out how it works, and 6 months of daily use, I'm used to it. Unfortunately, that is exactly the reaction Microsoft goes for.

I really don't like the way the new filters work, and I hate the new pivot table layout (luckily, I can still use the old layout), but it is part of the program and I just deal and move on. As with any upgrade, it gets rid of some old quirks and introduces new ones, occasionally doing the same with features and ergonomics.

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I can't stand the ribbon either. It's such a pain having to constantly switch tabs and look for stuff, when before I could easily drag and drop the most-used functions to a single toolbar, while having the good ol' non-space-wasting menus to find any lesser used stuff. I'm sticking with Office 2002 at home, but unfortunately the university "upgraded" over winter and there's no going back.

There are actually some places *selling* custom ribbons with the old UI on them for $20 or something.

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I could easily drag and drop the most-used functions to a single toolbar

That was another thing I didn't like about the upgrade..it seems much less intuitive to customize the ribbon/tool bar area. You have to find the options area, and not every function has its own icon any more (of the ones I used previously).

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Philocthetes

Join Date 10/2003

+153

That was another thing I didn't like about the upgrade..it seems much less intuitive to customize the ribbon/tool bar area.

If learning a new way to customize were the only problem here, I'd not be nearly as frustrated.

But when you combine that with the fact that you can no longer build floating toolbars or custom menus with custom key combos, it means long-term power users are inevitably putting in more physical work than they had to in the past to accomplish the same tasks. Wrists around the world are suffering needlessly.

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Achronous

Join Date 03/2006

+29

Lol, ok. But to be fair, there are features in 2007 that just aren't there in previous versions. Take referencing for example, it's just so much easier in 2007. I previous versions I think you had to buy an addon or another program like Endnote or Refworks. Now it's just there.

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Philocthetes

Join Date 10/2003

+153

I don't mind "new" stuff nearly so much as I mind stuff that is "improved" to the point that I can't use it any more.

Take named styles in Word. Word was my b*tch for many years. I earned most of my income because I can both throw down with English and could once whip that app like nobody's business. Today, I can't even tell at a glance what style is applied to the text I'm working unless by wild good luck it is one of the six that show up in the wretched new Styles whatever of the ribbon.

For anyone who's done serious document construction and management, understanding and using named styles in Word had been a blessing for many years. Now, I either still have a long learning curve ahead of me for the first time in 15 years or there is just no hope of getting reasonable command of the situation back. "Quick" Styles my overly ample behind...

p.s. to the ranters around here: I really was hoping to see more in this thread than MSFT talk; that's just where I started b/c that's where I'm currently most frustrated. Surely y'all have some stories about other software that made you wonder just what a given dev team meant by "feature" and "bug?"

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