OT: Microsoft Office

[GB]

Free for private use.

[polygonum]

I like the idea of ribbons. A specialist software product I knew very well changed from a fairly conventional menu approach to ribbons. And that made it far, far easier to use.

The advantage that it had over menus was presenting the full set of things that you could do without needing dropdown menus, etc. Which in that much more limited product helped a lot.

With the huge range of things available in products like Word and Excel the ribbon becomes over-burdened and we do not always reap the same benefits. Especially when you end up with all sorts of menus hanging off the ribbons (or whatever techniques have been used).

From memory, 2010 improved on the ribbon implementation considerably from 2007. But because I keep switching between 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013 with the odd bit of 2008 I am perpetually forgetting which has what features/differences.

[stuart noble]

There are some genuine improvements over 97, so I'm putting up with the Fisher Price interface. Macros being shoved up the end of the view menu still puzzles me though

[Roger Mills]

That's just what Word *doesn't* do! You need to know which of Home, Insert, Page Layout, etc you need to select in order to find the ribbon options you need. And they're often not where I'd expect them to be - or are called something completely different from what I'm used to!

[docholliday93]

t how to use it and found all the things that seemed to have been hidden...

hich exceed the limits in my previous version of Excel, so I was constantly getting error messages and finding the latest data had been discarded. (OK , I know I could have got round that by splitting the datasets up, which is what I was doing initially, but as the datasets kept growing it would have added hours to the working day...)

Well, if I had a free choice, possibly not - but the chap who designed the front end used Excel to do the plotting, and I'm stuck with it...

[Huge]

QED.

There are no "Windows conventions". How many different kinds of file chooser are there? 9? 10?

[tony sayer]

In article , Dave scribeth thus

If you want have a look at this, its a virtual Clone of Office one version is free and one is quite inexpensive. We've installed it on a few machines and seems to be more compatible with Ms office then Libre or Open Office..

It doesn't contain an e-mail cline but Thunderbird is fine for that..

[polygonum]

I agree that the complexity of products like Word make it far more difficult to design an effective ribbon-based product. So, yes, you do end up wondering which flaming ribbon you need to use.

Yes - renaming often messes things up!

[Rick Hughes]

2007 is a whole lot better than 2003, but not gone further than 2007

[polygonum]

If the mail profile gets changed in any way by 2013 then it will be unusable by 2007. So safest to create your own new profile for 2013 "manually".

[bert]

And for the part time user is absolute shit.

[bert]

I should stick if I were you.

[bert]

+1