Quote:
Originally Posted by zerospinboson
More accessible styles support makes it heaps better. Changing every italicized word, or every indented blockquote, or every heading has become a lot easier to do. While this feature already existed at least in office2003, the fact that they put it where people would find it (and integrated it into the spellcheck thing) is very nice.
I do hate to disagree with people, but in pre-Office2007, every function was hidden in a random place. Now only some of the functions are, and they are generally in a more logical place. Why is it bad that it's in a different place when the new place is at least more logical?
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Logical to whom? It still seems random to me-and *differently* random, which is what gets in the way of productivity.
Styles are a poor choice as they're used by very few people. Of course those that do use them use them extensively-so it's a typical Microsoft approach, cater to the 'big' users & ignore the myriad 'little' ones. (I can document the use, at least locally, by checking my support records. And since I operated a support service, not an in-house help desk, those records cover the local geographic area-not the local company. I see no reason why people living in this area would use Word in a significantly different manner than people living elsewhere, so I'm assuming the application of my local experience to users in general is valid. That's an *assumption*, not necessarily a fact.)
But even considering styles, what makes putting them on a ribbon any better than putting them in a menu? Or maybe it's because you prefer your 'menus' pre-customized? Also based on my experience I've found that few users customize their menus-but I customized mine, and put my styles in a sub-menu list. Access to a style took 3 keystrokes. Hardly what I'd call 'hidden' but it did take some work to set it up. So Microsoft saved me the work, at the cost of 'hiding' the location from me (because they're no longer on the menu/ribbon where I'm used to finding them).
Now this isn't unique to Office 2007 either-Microsoft has done the exact same thing (with different functions) on every version of Office since I started using it (and I don't remember the first version of Office, but I do remember using Word for Windows 1.0). The only new thing in Office 2007, as far as I can see, is replacing menus with ribbons-and I don't really care about that. Force me to use it for 6 months or so & I'll get used to the new locations. Of course you'll get less productivity out of me for those 6 months, but that's part of the price you pay for upgrading.