5 ms·

Whatever are you complaining about? Little as I am a fan of the WYSIWYG philosophy, Office is a genuinely spectacular product.

• jmspring 12y ago
  Office, like Excel, was mostly complete years ago. The iterations on file format and ribbon bar? Not so useful for most users.
  • vertex-four 12y ago
    As a casual user of the various Office apps, the ribbon bar is what made it usable. Before that, I'd make every attempt to keep out of Office. Those who use it with any regularity likely know the keyboard shortcuts for things they use regularly, and the ribbon should work for finding the less common things in the same way it helps me as a casual user find everything.
    • jimmaswell 12y ago
      The ribbon bar made it more usable? I just found it annoying. Word 2003 still seems like the best form factor to me.
      • vertex-four 12y ago
        It did. I couldn't find anything before the ribbon bar, frankly, and using tools took significantly more time because I had to search for them in overly long menus, or even submenus. Now they're mostly laid out directly in front of me, logically and visually ordered. I don't feel that menus are a good UI to anything. It would seem that most UX people now agree with me, as traditional menu bars have been de-emphasised across nearly all the apps I use. Word was the only app which required me to delve into the menus in common use. Why do you think the ribbon bar has a worse UX than a menu bar?
        • quink 12y ago
          Don't you know that change frightens and confuses people? For anyone for who changes do just that, check this out, which I think is the most impressive example of data-driven UI design ever documented even remotely this well: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/table-of-contents.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/table-of-... I love the ribbon. If you don't, try one of two things. One, try double-clicking on one of the headers - it'll make the ribbon hide unless you click it. This makes it effectively work like the old menus, except more horizontal and graphical instead of vertical. The second is to scroll your mouse wheel while hovering over the ribbon.
          • jimmaswell 12y ago
            Change does frighten and confuse people which is why the principle of least surprise is part of the human interface guidelines, but nobody seems to care about that anymore.
        • jimmaswell 12y ago
          I don't know if I'd really say it's worse, except for that it breaks the standard expectation and user interfaces are supposed to follow a uniform design on one environment, but it's a change and I prefer interfaces not to change.
• Tloewald 12y ago
  I said for "good and ill". If you can't see the problems in Office then you aren't looking very hard.
  • jimmaswell 12y ago
    What exactly are these problems? My only problem has been difficulty forcing it to get down to "advanced options" on certain parts where something needs a minor adjustment that doesn't work through the normal channels
• mortenjorck 12y ago
  Indeed, apart from that WYSIWYG. If Word were focused only on text editing (at which it is peerless) and not at all on design and typesetting (at which it is execrable), it would be a nearly perfect product.
  • adestefan 12y ago
    I've learned there is one rule when it comes to design in Word: Thou shall only use styles. Once someone tries to muck with settings for individual pieces external of the style then it just goes to hell. I wish they'd take all the formatting tools out of toolbar and only have them accessible via the style formatter.