Saturday, December 22, 2007

I WAS NOT ANGRY SINCE I CAME TO FRANCE, UNTIL THIS INSTANT: I realize I'm noticing this two years after the fact -- having purchased a replacement PC with a good deal on the whole MS Suite -- but who in Hades decided to completely re-engineer the user interface of Microsoft Word?

One of the reasons I've resisted buying a Mac is that I'm used to the core Microsoft products. Not that they're good. Getting consistent formatting on a MS Word document still takes too much work (or the liberal use of the sec'y services pool), but I draft a document without ever needing to find anything.

I've been using this program for seventeen years and well in excess of a million words of product. I knew, reflexively, where all core commands were. Indeed, for my purposes the software had become utterly transparent to the task at hand. Yet Microsoft decided I would be more productive if I had to search for the "new document" or "save" buttons, the former of which just took me three minutes to find.

This product -- in which the task of "creating documents" has finally and completely overwhelmed the task of writing -- is now worse than useless to me.

N.B.: Yes, I am aware that most of the shortcut keys remain the same. Did Microsoft decide that those should be changed? No. Why not? Because, people were used to them.

No comments:

Post a Comment