5 ms·

> 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 disappea

> 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. Stupidity is contagious. And Microsoft's idea of innovation is copying what the others do and brake it beyond all repair. > I've tried Word and Excel, both behaved so. > Insane! I'm shocked you used such a © "word". The new way to have fun is to be in a meeting and see the presenter trying for 5 minutes to find something in the ribbon menu.

frosted-flakes 7y ago
> Stupidity is contagious. And Microsoft's idea of innovation is copying what the others do Microsoft Office switched to the "backstage" menu in Office 2010, long before full-screen menus became a popular pattern. Office 2007 had the app menu, which is the same as the File menu in the Windows File Explorer. In my opinion, the app menu is far superior simply because it doesn't change the context and it's easily dismissable. > The new way to have fun is to be in a meeting and see the presenter trying for 5 minutes to find something in the ribbon menu. The Ribbon is far superior to the old teetering tower of random menus, toolbars, and panels. Everything is in a single logical place, with (almost) every button having a text label and many having intuitive icons. And now it has a search bar.
- zrobotics 7y ago
  I'm fine with the ribbon, but good God do I hate the full screen save & open menus. They've obscured the "save as" functionality and really push one drive saving. Even as a one-drive user, oftentimes I just want to save a file on my disk in a specific spot without backing it up to the cloud. I really wish Libreoffice Calc was a better Excel replacement, because it feels like Excel gets more dumbed-down each year. I get a UTF-8 csv emailed daily from a vendor, and I still can't get Excel to treat it properly. It only applies that setting to that specific file, I can't change it system-wide. Maybe it's possible, I found it easier to just write a python script to convert the files to windows-1250 like it expects. The ribbon is far superior to the old menus though, this week I needed to create a shudder PowerPoint presentation. Don't think I've needed to do that in 5 years, but it was easy enough to find all the functionality I needed. Plus, the search box actually shows where the buttons are located, so you actually learn how to use the program instead of relying on search. I remember the mess the Office 07 menus were, any time there was a need to use a feature that wasn't familiar was a chore. I remember actually needing to Google for some excel feature and needing to rely on screenshots of the menus to find what I needed. I don't get it, since Visual Studio has far more complexity buried in it than Word, but I've never had anywhere near the difficulty finding features than I did with the old Office menus.
  - galangalalgol 7y ago
    There hasnt been a good excel released in 20 years. Libreoffice is pretty hideous, gnumeric is maybe a bit better. I rely on excel key shortcuts which didnt change even when the menus they referenced disappeared. Libreoffice has some but not all of them. Google sheets does better but my dev network is airgapped so that doesn't help.
acqq 7y ago
What I refer to is the picture like here: https://superuser.com/questions/642978/change-the-behavior-of-the-file-menu-in-office-2013-so-that-the-document-remains https://superuser.com/questions/642978/change-the-behavior-o... Clicking on the File menu gets you "Protect Document -- Protect Document" "Check for Issues -- Inspect Document" and "Manage Versions -- Versions" effectively as the only "obvious choices" with two different wordings (why?) and with a lot of "stuff" left and right "Properties" "Related Dates" "Related People" ? It's specifically not obvious that the "menu" is in the blue area on the left and that the three buttons are... what are they actually? How come these three came to be the major actions one would want to do in the File menu? And why the document disappeared like I'm on the small mobile screen? I'm aware now they did that for many years, still... it's... confusing on the big screen.

frosted-flakes 7y ago

> Stupidity is contagious. And Microsoft's idea of innovation is copying what the others do Microsoft Office switched to the "backstage" menu in Office 2010, long before full-screen menus became a popular pattern. Office 2007 had the app menu, which is the same as the File menu in the Windows File Explorer. In my opinion, the app menu is far superior simply because it doesn't change the context and it's easily dismissable. > The new way to have fun is to be in a meeting and see the presenter trying for 5 minutes to find something in the ribbon menu. The Ribbon is far superior to the old teetering tower of random menus, toolbars, and panels. Everything is in a single logical place, with (almost) every button having a text label and many having intuitive icons. And now it has a search bar.

zrobotics 7y ago
I'm fine with the ribbon, but good God do I hate the full screen save & open menus. They've obscured the "save as" functionality and really push one drive saving. Even as a one-drive user, oftentimes I just want to save a file on my disk in a specific spot without backing it up to the cloud. I really wish Libreoffice Calc was a better Excel replacement, because it feels like Excel gets more dumbed-down each year. I get a UTF-8 csv emailed daily from a vendor, and I still can't get Excel to treat it properly. It only applies that setting to that specific file, I can't change it system-wide. Maybe it's possible, I found it easier to just write a python script to convert the files to windows-1250 like it expects. The ribbon is far superior to the old menus though, this week I needed to create a shudder PowerPoint presentation. Don't think I've needed to do that in 5 years, but it was easy enough to find all the functionality I needed. Plus, the search box actually shows where the buttons are located, so you actually learn how to use the program instead of relying on search. I remember the mess the Office 07 menus were, any time there was a need to use a feature that wasn't familiar was a chore. I remember actually needing to Google for some excel feature and needing to rely on screenshots of the menus to find what I needed. I don't get it, since Visual Studio has far more complexity buried in it than Word, but I've never had anywhere near the difficulty finding features than I did with the old Office menus.
- galangalalgol 7y ago
  There hasnt been a good excel released in 20 years. Libreoffice is pretty hideous, gnumeric is maybe a bit better. I rely on excel key shortcuts which didnt change even when the menus they referenced disappeared. Libreoffice has some but not all of them. Google sheets does better but my dev network is airgapped so that doesn't help.

acqq 7y ago

What I refer to is the picture like here: https://superuser.com/questions/642978/change-the-behavior-of-the-file-menu-in-office-2013-so-that-the-document-remains https://superuser.com/questions/642978/change-the-behavior-o... Clicking on the File menu gets you "Protect Document -- Protect Document" "Check for Issues -- Inspect Document" and "Manage Versions -- Versions" effectively as the only "obvious choices" with two different wordings (why?) and with a lot of "stuff" left and right "Properties" "Related Dates" "Related People" ? It's specifically not obvious that the "menu" is in the blue area on the left and that the three buttons are... what are they actually? How come these three came to be the major actions one would want to do in the File menu? And why the document disappeared like I'm on the small mobile screen? I'm aware now they did that for many years, still... it's... confusing on the big screen.