Word 2007 - it's awful!

robt_2

Money_Grabber13579 wrote: »

Don't get used to it too much because Office 2010 will be here at the end of the year! (Or early next year at the latest!)

A release of "the first half of 2010" doesn't necessarily mean early next year at the latest.

And nor is the ribbon interface being ditched so you might as well get used to it now.

sharkie

The person, management and marketing teams that the left off the old style interface should have been fired! They should have let the end punter have the choice between the old style and or the new one. The choice should have been in an easy switcheable format.

If you are a big organization and your roll it out 95% of the staff will have trouble working with it and all your staff will have to be re-trained, so beside being strange and hard to use, not all big business adopted it.

superscaper

sharkie wrote: »

The person, management and marketing teams that the left off the old style interface should have been fired! They should have let the end punter have the choice between the old style and or the new one. The choice should have been in an easy switcheable format.

If you are a big organization and your roll it out 95% of the staff will have trouble working with it and all your staff will have to be re-trained, so beside being strange and hard to use, not all big business adopted it.

I'm so glad, means it's not as bloated as it could have been then.

robt_2

sharkie wrote: »

The person, management and marketing teams that the left off the old style interface should have been fired! They should have let the end punter have the choice between the old style and or the new one. The choice should have been in an easy switcheable format.

If you are a big organization and your roll it out 95% of the staff will have trouble working with it and all your staff will have to be re-trained, so beside being strange and hard to use, not all big business adopted it.

Yes, much more sensible to have to have two lots of help files and two lots of support available...

Has that 95% of staff statistic got anything to back it up? I have seen many companies adopt it with minimal problems as it is so intuitive.

VfM4meplse

I have never felt so deskilled in front of a terminal as when I attempted to use Word 2007. Maybe my intuition works differently??! I heard that it was being scrapped because it was so dreadful so lets hope 2010 is a big improvement.

superscaper

VfM4meplse wrote: »

I heard that it was being scrapped because it was so dreadful so lets hope 2010 is a big improvement.

Heard it would be scrapped where? "Dreadful" according to who? If anything Office 2010 will make MORE use of the ribbon interface (i.e. extending it's use to Outlook, Onenote, Visio fully as well).

More and more of the apps I use are using the ribbon interface and I'm not talking of MS apps. I wish all the apps I used had a ribbon interface to be frank.

[Deleted User]

VfM4meplse wrote: »

I have never felt so deskilled in front of a terminal as when I attempted to use Word 2007. Maybe my intuition works differently??! I heard that it was being scrapped because it was so dreadful so lets hope 2010 is a big improvement.

It's very inefficient to have to take your hands away from the keyboard in an office suite in order to navigate the menus, that's why the array of keyboard short cuts and the Ribbon are the best things to have happened to Office.

It's not being scrapped, in fact check out the screen shots of 2010 Technical Preview. It's still there and rightly so. Take ten minutes to browse through the vast resources Microsoft released in order to help people get to grips with it..

loudcox

As a deeply technical user of the office suite, I HATED the ribbon when it first came around.

I can quite happily say that I was entirely wrong: it's probably the single best step Microsoft has ever taken in their software - and certainly the boldest. The only place it doesn't work is in Access.

The only thing I still can't get used to is the dropping of "blue background, white text" interface option. Although it may have been a nod to WordPerfect 5.1, it was actually far more pleasant to work on for long stretches of time.

frivolous_fay

Any tips on getting past the 'OMG I can't find a damn thing' stage?
Like a tutorial or something?
And if there's a tutorial in word...


... how the hell do I find it?

loudcox

If you have a look at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA100898951033.aspx you'll see links to "Up to speed with..." (expand the sections under "Learn more about...").

Just think of the ribbon as being a graphical version of the old menus. The tabs are the menu headers, and the individual options enable you to quick select something that you'd have previously opened a dialog for. If you need to get to a dialog, most groups of options have an expand option on the bottom right.

I'd practise before you need to use it in anger. For example, just create a table (Insert => Table). You'll find that when you're in the table the last two tabs on the ribbon will be highlighted as they contain specific features for the item.