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> I've just seen the new Microsoft Office. On the desktop. With a big screen. But just pressing the File menu makes the document you work on completely disappe

> I've just seen the new Microsoft Office. On the desktop. With a big screen. But just pressing the File menu makes the document you work on completely disappear behind something useless. That's been the case for I think a decade now. Maybe longer. To be fair, now days they make really good use of that space. Earlier iterations of that UI were pretty bad, but a giant list of recent documents, a list of recent document templates, and all the main commands to do things (save, open) are positions to the left where they have always been. Given that Word now days auto-saves (about time!), the main thing I'm going into the File menu for is to switch to a different file, at which point the file menu showing me a list of, well, files, is pretty useful to be honest. Also it has a search box, and search boxes are nice, I welcome UI changes that allow for more search boxes in the world.

deleted 7y ago
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Jaruzel 7y ago
I think it auto saves only for Office 365 or SharePoint based documents. It definitely doesn't auto save my documents when they are local or on a network share.
- com2kid 7y ago
  One Drive files as well. Strange it doesn't do local, but I imagine there are legacy reasons for that. Everything in Office is old. Often it is crazy well engineered, but decisions set in stone decades ago still linger on.
  - coribuci 7y ago
    > Often it is crazy well engineered, but decisions set in stone decades ago still linger on. YMMV
    - com2kid 7y ago
      Well engineered and coded decisions made in the age of single user desktops are still well engineered. Hard for someone in 1995 to predict the need for a file format that supports real time coauthoring with automatic saving and complete revision control of every edit. Esp. when the target machine the code had to run on was a 486 with a slow hard drive and a tiny bit of memory. Of course Office updated their file format, but they probably did it a little bit too soon. I always wondered what would've happened if they had waited a few more years, released in 2007, so probably design started a few years prior. Talk about just being a smidgen too early for a world of unlimited(-ish) data and always on internet connections. Oops.

deleted 7y ago

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Jaruzel 7y ago

I think it auto saves only for Office 365 or SharePoint based documents. It definitely doesn't auto save my documents when they are local or on a network share.

com2kid 7y ago
One Drive files as well. Strange it doesn't do local, but I imagine there are legacy reasons for that. Everything in Office is old. Often it is crazy well engineered, but decisions set in stone decades ago still linger on.
- coribuci 7y ago
  > Often it is crazy well engineered, but decisions set in stone decades ago still linger on. YMMV
  - com2kid 7y ago
    Well engineered and coded decisions made in the age of single user desktops are still well engineered. Hard for someone in 1995 to predict the need for a file format that supports real time coauthoring with automatic saving and complete revision control of every edit. Esp. when the target machine the code had to run on was a 486 with a slow hard drive and a tiny bit of memory. Of course Office updated their file format, but they probably did it a little bit too soon. I always wondered what would've happened if they had waited a few more years, released in 2007, so probably design started a few years prior. Talk about just being a smidgen too early for a world of unlimited(-ish) data and always on internet connections. Oops.