I’ve been using the latest version of Microsoft Office for Windows a few weeks now at work. Save your money and stick to whatever previous version of Office you have.
We (and by we I mean you who ordered this software for me) should have seen the warning signs in the last upgrade: Office is entering its Baroque period, or is it Rococo already? I now count four (4) [IV] {oooo} icons in the menu bars of Outlook that use a magnifying glass. Only one of them actually lets you search through your mail. The others will either: scan your messages for viruses, toggle message content preview, or show you a print preview. Can you guess which is which?
Sorry, no answers from me, I already forgot which is which and I can’t be bothered to look it up. Elsewhere — for example when you are writing an email or using Word — the search function is represented by binoculars, something which I use all the time when reading a book or newspaper closely.
The only tangible change to my daily MS genuflections is the layout of the main window in Outlook. You can now have the windows split horizontally, instead of vertically, which makes sense on screens that are wider rather than taller.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is continuing its attempts to turn email into something other than standard plain text messages. I spent the first 15 minutes of my time with the new Outlook turning off receipt requests (it’s rude, OK?), HTML rendering and RTF style defaults. And, bizarrely, the email window pane now looks like a print preview screen:
I’ve noticed from screenshots that the upcoming new Mac version of Office has the same shaded border too. Why should I want to think of my email as a printed document? It’s a waste of screen space and yet one more mixed metaphor to battle.
Talking of battles, earlier this week I spent a few hours playing Battlefield Vietnam, the month-old successor to Battlefield 1942, at a gaming cafe here in Stockholm for research purposesI kid you not. You’ll read about it in a month or so.. It is a magnificent game for networked team play. One odd sensation came from an unexpected feature of the game: Sometimes you play as Vietcong, and take potshots at Americans as they try to implement US foreign policy.
I’ve played my fair share of multiplayer WWII 3D shootem-ups, in which being a German soldier is fairly run-of-the-mill; somebody’s got to be the Indian. Simulate conflicts that are closer to the present day, however, and a gamer’s ironic detachment is no longer readily buttressed by historical distance. Still, at the rate these games are coming to market, I do not think I will be waiting 30 years before I get the opportunity to play Capture the Flag as a Sunni on a Falluja map.
It is very strange, Stefan, I have been using Office 2003 since the beta version and have had none of the problems you describe and have been perfectly able to default everything according to my personal preferences. This includes “turning off receipt requests”. But probably I cannot appreciate the difficulties meeting more sophisticated users.
But hating Microsoft sits well with the blogging community, I know that. But if you are unconfortable with MS, why don’t you join the Mac/Linus/MT/’open source’/ community? It is free, too. The remaining 98 % of us won’t mind. Chacun a son go˚t.
Btw, I find using ‘plain text’ utterly boring and, to my mind, somewhat snobbish. If you excuse me.
Glad Påsk, nevertheless. Don’t let the Bill-bugs bite you!
Yes, as a sophisticated user, I’d like to be left alone, which means turning off all the features my organization has paid MS for. (I must say that one thing I haven’t missed is the paper clip, which disappears from this version. Maybe that is worth an upgrade.)
Of course, I am paid to use Office, so I gladly use it. But what I am criticizing implicitly in my post is the fact that where I work, somebody paid MS with tax money for a site-wide license for a mature product that does all the same things as Office 2000, which I used until 3 weeks ago.
Of course, on an abstract level, I feel for MS, because a product like a word processor does not stop working from wear and tear. So they need to either continue offering compellling innovations or migrate to a subscription model; the first is difficult if you enjoy a monopoly around proprietary file formats and the product is mature, the second is unpalatable to your customers. This is why I think MS’s finest hour has gone, and it no longer poses the kinds of threats that the EU is now shadowboxing against.
I’m surprised- I’d assumed you were a Mac user. But from your comment there, maybe you moonlight in OS X, and during the day area mild-mannered XP user…
Does the Battlefield: Vietnam game allow you to engage in all the morally reprehensible stuff both sides engaged in during the war? Is there a napalm old-growth-forest mission? Can you take out some GIs using your baby as a bomb? Is there a catch-a-wave-on-the-morning-surf mission?
Yes, OSX by choice, Win2K by necessity.
Friendly fire is definitely allowed. So is strafing the forest randomly out of a low-flying helicopter. But beyond that I don’t know; I didn’t play it long enough to try anything but a few multiplayer maps.
I can not tell you how happy one of my (many) bosses will be to have his e-mail look like a paper version.
I once spent 15 minutes with him explaining that, no – there was no way to start his text further over in the screen. It took me the first five minutes to figure out he was bothered by the lack of margin.
Of course, this is the man I found literally cutting and pasting a document one day – who knew the term was more than a casual analogy, but an actual practice?
AJ
re. the OSX version of outlook — that’s a lot of real estate. The frame around the message doesn’t bother me that much, it would be neat if you could do your own frame theme.