back to article Five words everyone wants to hear: Microsoft has 'visually refreshed' Office

Amid the unveiling of Windows 11 and the backlash over the frankly pisspoor way Microsoft handled the operating system's hardware requirements, the software behemoth quietly emitted a native ARM64 build of its Office cash cow. It announced a little redesign of Office, too, or as Redmond put it, a "visual refresh." The state …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Custom ribbon?

    How about killing it with fire and nuking it from orbit just to be sure? Repeatedly. With extreme prejudice. Until it glows in the day.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: Custom ribbon?

      But now it as muted pastel colours and rounded corners

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Custom ribbon?

        At YAAC, re: pastel colours & rounded corners.

        So do the controls on the orbital nuke. I started to enter the GPS coords into the targeting system when Clippy popped up to simper "It looks like you're trying to-" at which point I wanted to install a bobbing bird sculpture over the launch button to continuously bombard those bastards back into primordial ooze.

        I don't GAFF about rounded corners & pretty colours, I _do_ care about a stable system that doesn't change the layout of the controls every time some MS douchebag gets a bug up their arse. The ribbon is an abomination unto Nuggin & deserves everyone responsible for it to have their faces bitten off by ravenous Bugbladder beasts from Traal.

        1. Dazed and Confused
          Mushroom

          Re: Custom ribbon?

          But but but ... they've got so many bugs where else are they going to put them?

          I'm with you on this one. Stop bloody well moving the controls. QWERTY might be a f******g stupid layout for a keyboard but every touch typist's fingers know where the button are. The brake peddle on a car doesn't need relocating to the passengers side and the steering wheel doesn't need to relocate to which ever occupant last commented on the directions to the destination.

          Leave the bloody controls where they were.

          Improvements in handling big docs would be good, I'm just not sure I believe them because they've promised this loads of times before. Words handling of master documents so you can break things up into separate files for, say chapters, is pathetic and what it does to the style gallery just beggars belief. Maybe someone in MS' marketing dept. thinks a bigger document is a two page letter rather than a tweet. If you decide to avoid master docs and separate files then it just does stupid things as the document grows. The one I'm working on at the moment is over 1600 pages (is that large? I bet people will come back with much bigger ones) so every few minutes it does an autosave, which is a good thing, but it freezes for quite a number of seconds while this happens. It's a fast i7 powered system with 24GB of RAM and an NVMe SSD. What's more, half the time if you do anything while it is autosaving it pops up the saveas screen and random parts of what you've typed are lost. WHY?

          If they want to do something constructive with office try turning it into a suite rather than a box set of random unrelated programs. Why oh Why is the text editor and picture editor in Word and PowerPoint different? Why can't I have a style gallery in PPT? Bloody well integrate these damn things.

          OK, I know why they are different - History - but that is the sort of thing they should damn well be focusing on and not changing the colour scheme of their bloody menus.

          1. TRT

            Re: Custom ribbon?

            Oh Jesus. I tried to show my mother how to integrate the individual Word documents (poems) she had been working on into a single Word document (en route to a pdf for submission to a publisher), a task I had done a dozen times or more around 15-20 years ago when I was a publication assistant to a group of professors.

            "This'll be a snip", I thought, "After all, it's so long since this was an obscure but easily done job... link a series of live documents into a Master document that can create a chapter list, index and bibliography but retain live updating from individual documents".

            No Fucking Way on EARTH is this possible nowadays. I spent about 18 hours glued to the keyboard, resorting to looking it up in on numerous "help" websites. Every time I thought I'd found the secret sauce to make this work, it turns out it's NOT applicable to the latest version (a Christmas Present I wish I'd never bought my mother). I ended up just glueing it together by copying and pasting. All the elegance of Word 6's Master document handling had vanished.

            Fuck you, Microsoft.

            1. Dazed and Confused

              Re: Custom ribbon?

              I really feel for you on this.

              As far as I can tell every version of Word since the late 90s has done this is a totally different and inconsistent way.

              Building a table of contents for multiple files works a totally different way too (don't try mixing these it breaks everything). For the ToC you use reference documents (I think that's the name) and you can edit them - Yay! but not for master documents. It sticks the full pathname for the files into the master document and then it does something weird with OneDrive so you can't copy the damn things.

              ARGH!

              It is often easier to just make a new master document and add the component parts again.

              Oh did I mention the style gallery? now look at it.

              1. TRT

                Re: Custom ribbon?

                I saw the Style Gallery. My mother had unfortunately used a different style in each document and when they were viewed next to each other it didn't look good, so I tried to show her how to apply a style that could be adjusted and applied automatically to multiple documents and parts of a document.

                The pain was excruciating. Nothing worked as it used to - The option to remove all styles appears to have gone - that was the ultimate reset button... now every time you try to create a style it mashes everything up together.

          2. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

            Re: Custom ribbon?

            "half the time if you do anything while it is autosaving it pops up the saveas screen and random parts of what you've typed are lost. WHY?"

            I'm pretty sure the saveas is a brain-dead Office version of read consistency. Autosave starts, edits are made while in progress, PANIC! "If you don't save your latest changes the world will end!". It's obvious they don't even understand the difference between save and autosave. A sane approach would be to just let it go, finish the autosave, and wait for the next autosave cycle to capture the latest edits.

            As for random parts lost, most likely it's because you were typing into the not-yet-visible, but somehow in-focus saveas dialog. I get similar all the time when I start some application -- while I'm waiting an eternity for it to display, I try to get something else done, but the not-yet-visible application keeps stealing focus.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Custom ribbon?

          Yea. The latest seems to be making the contrast of the GUI suck so as to be impossible to find the text boxes. You see this on web interfaces all of the time. I am sure its part of some security theater thing.

        3. hopkinse
          Mushroom

          Re: Custom ribbon?

          Some Vogon poetry would be more appropriate - slow and painful death!

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Custom ribbon?

            At Hopkinse. I wholeheartedly approve of your suggestion for proper punishment. I will award bonus points & give an extra cookie if you can come up with a suitable means of injecting said tortuous tormentations directly into their brains so the rest of us aren't in danger of hearing it ourselves.

      2. Dave559

        Re: Custom ribbon?

        "But now it [has] muted pastel colours and rounded corners"

        I wonder if Apple's lawyers are planning to have a word with Micros~1 about that…?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Custom ribbon?

      now, that's a fire I would warm myself by any day of the week, as I limed the ground it sprang from.

    3. Potemkine! Silver badge

      Re: Custom ribbon?

      Ribbons look more and more like multiple-rows toolbars. Customization is a step closer to original toolbars. I see that as a slight admission the concept was a huge failure.

      1. AMBxx Silver badge
        Facepalm

        Re: Custom ribbon?

        Looks horribly like built-in chat in that screenshot too.

        'It looks like you're trying to concentrate on work. Would you like to be interrupted?'

        1. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
          Mushroom

          Re: Custom ribbon?

          Just wait until you see the pop-up ads.

          You just know they're coming.

          "It looks like you're writing a bomb threat...here are some nearby explosives vendors"

          1. Anonymous Custard Silver badge
            Mushroom

            Re: Custom ribbon?

            And that's the "fun" with Teams too.

            Had this the other day on an "Advanced VBA in Excel" course (I know, I know) given by an external company via Teams.

            On a dual screen laptop/monitor set-up, with Teams mininised whilst I worked on the example code (Excel in one window, VBA screen in the other) when a fellow student unmuted his mike or shared his screen to ask a question of the tutor.

            And what happens? Teams suddenly pops up full screen and takes the focus. So me rather than typing away in my code window am now suddenly looking at and typing into the Teams window. It was happening at least once every 5 minutes during the course, meaning I couldn't get anything at all done or concentrate on getting the code correct.

            And it looks like this unwanted focus stealing cannot be turned off.

            Previously we've done these courses via either Skype or Webex and neither of them did this. But no, it has now been decreed that we must use Teams for such things and it's an utter abomination (unto anyone up to and including Nuggan).

      2. Flywheel

        Re: Custom ribbon?

        Ah yes, the dawn of the 9-plus row ribbon... what's that? you want to be able to actually work on your document? Buy a bigger screen!

    4. HammerOn1024

      Re: Custom ribbon?

      Also, to avoid a reoccurrence, toss the development and management team into a rat infested pit of black death... the only way to be totally sure.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A refresh usually means that the most used functions are in a different place. Spend a bit to long looking for the search function in Outlook, it's in the bloody titlebar.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      All part of the the master plan. Make everyone feel they are a bit stupid and thick because they have to use search to get help on finding where to look for their desired function. Net result, people dislike using office and look for ways to avoid using it.

    2. Richard 12 Silver badge

      And tries to make you search Help all the time.

      I don't want to search Help. I want to search in my emails!

      If I wanted to search in Help then I'd click on a Help thing and search there.

    3. Hubert Cumberdale Silver badge

      It's worse than that – when they release things like so-called "modern comments", they utterly f#ck with my workflow as an editor. All the other people who actually use Word for editing absolutely hate this change, and the only way to avoid it is to revert to a previous version of Word and disable updates. I think I'm now on my "last" version of Word – I shall probably not change for the next decade if it means having the f#ck-up that is the new comment system.

  3. Ramis101

    Still using Office 2003 thanks

    It just works. used it on XP, 7 and now 10. even 10 on a tablet. given all the M$ BS about 'tablet centric ui design" or whatever marketing said, 2k3 still just works.

    why the hell should i learn where M$ has put the bloody buttons this week. Office, and Windows are both tools. no one has redesigned the hammer in the last 20yrs, functionality can be added without fucking up the UI every time.

    Someone should try and point that out to marketing.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Oh the 'irony' (pun intended).

        Oh the 'irony' (pun intended). Going forward, if Microsoft (and Apple for that matter) are going to consign billions of PCs/macs to landfill using artifically constrained superficial updates that involve pastel shades and TPM 2.0 chips, what better way for Jony Ive types to now spend their design time, than designing a newly milled steel hammer with a $260 price tag? /s

      3. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

        Re: I'll just leave this here:

        Does it come with a ribbon?

        1. Michael Habel

          Re: I'll just leave this here:

          No the Ribbon is extra, and must be installed by the end-user.

      4. Ken G Silver badge
        Trollface

        Re: Still using Office 2003 thanks

        When all you have is a hammer, every problems starts to look like someone who needs to be hit with a hammer until they fix it.

        1. Pirate Dave Silver badge
          Pirate

          Re: Still using Office 2003 thanks

          When all you have is a Microsoft hammer, everything looks like a security-Torqx screw.

    2. logicalextreme

      Re: Still using Office 2003 thanks

      It also doesn't have that preposterous row and column limit increase in Excel that pretty much told anyone who'd been holding off to start using it as a database. 2003 was indeed the last of the sensible Office releases.

      1. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: Still using Office 2003 thanks

        Sooo....what you're saying, is that real functional improvements in Office ended in 2003, and everything since has been UI redesign and flash "feature" additions that no one ever uses?

        Sounds about right.

        1. logicalextreme

          Re: Still using Office 2003 thanks

          I seem to recall they also crippled VBA in 2007, but I realise now that that was a good thing.

          1. logicalextreme

            Re: Still using Office 2003 thanks

            Oh actually, they did add a "remove duplicates" command at some point after 2003 which definitely beat having to carry a macro around with you or mess around with functions. Unfortunately it's somewhere in the Ribbon interface.

    3. dave 81

      Re: Still using Office 2003 thanks

      I wish I could still be using 2003,, But big company IT went balls deep for SaaS O365. I swear loudly and daily at it. Good thing not been in the office for over a year. And that fracking ribbon, I might have gotten the hang of the bits I needed by now if they would just stop bleeping changing it. /rant

  4. rshpount
    FAIL

    Can we get the menu back?

    The only visual refresh I care about would be to switch the ribbon to a toolbar, or, at least put it vertically at the side of the document.

    1. Red Ted
      FAIL

      Re: Can we get the menu back?

      Menus to the left or right.

      Why on earth do MS (and it’s not only them) insist on putting menus and ribbons across the top or bottom, given that we all have wide screen monitors now?

      The fact that the task bar works better up the side, as you can see all the names even when it gets full, and the clock nicely shows the day and date. For a bonus you get an extra few pixels height to do your actual work in.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Can we get the menu back?

        Not just Microsoft, web browsers and web designers like to do that as well. I swear that 1/2 the vertical space can be eaten up by startbar, menubar, search bar, footer, cookie notice, website search/navigation bar...

      2. Mark #255
        Facepalm

        Re: Task bar positioning

        In Windows 11, the task bar is irretrievably glued to the bottom of the screen.

        1. Richard 12 Silver badge

          Re: Task bar positioning

          Wait, what? Seriously?

          1. Mark #255

            Re: Task bar positioning

            From the horse's mouth:

            Feature deprecation and removal

            • Taskbar functionality is changed including:
              • [...]
              • Alignment to the bottom of the screen is the only location allowed.

            1. Red Ted
              FAIL

              Re: Task bar positioning

              Noooo! That's just mad, for all the reasons I said above!

            2. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
              Mushroom

              Re: Task bar positioning

              Why?

              Why restrict something when you could allow the user to put it anywhere that's most efficient for them?

              Oh....Microsoft. Say no more.

            3. Aussie Doc
              Mushroom

              Re: Task bar positioning

              That friggin' horse is going to be glue!

        2. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

          Re: the task bar is irretrievably glued to the bottom of the screen

          Don't complain too much. They might re-enable Ctrl+Alt+Arrow, or even change the hotkey combination to make it even easier to press in error.

          (Yes, I speak from long experience of many panic phone calls).

      3. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: Can we get the menu back?

        Dell monitors can turn 90 degrees. My boss has one turned specifically to address this issue. Pages fit better (ribbons don't).

        Choose your poison

  5. boblongii

    So

    Still a jumbled chaotic mess, then? But with rounded corners because, like flares, that just keeps coming back into style.

    MS know about as much about UI design as they do about anything else. Possibly less.

  6. Charlie van Becelaere
    Flame

    And

    please just stop changing the keyboard shortcuts from version to version!

    Surely I'm not the only one who tries to keep his hands on the keyboard and finds their changing of muscle-memorised keyboard shortcuts from version to version to be frustrating.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Trollface

      Re: And

      Just be grateful Clippit the Office Assistant isn't making a comeback in this "visual refresh".

    2. Zippy´s Sausage Factory
      Flame

      Re: And

      Excel is a horror for that. All the shortcuts are different from everything else, and in the last version they took away the ability to customise them. Almost immediately someone opened a uservoice to get them back, and after a whole year and loads of votes they just replied "hahaha nope".

      And they wonder why people use LibreOffice...

  7. cjcox

    We found John, finally!

    After 20 years of searching, we were able to find John Babich, the creator of the original Windows 3.1 icons and panels to design the new Dictator, Editor and Designer ribbon sections. Not only that, but also the new Dictator, Editor and Designer ribbon sections.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I just wish they would re-introduce theme customisation so that users could create their own Then they could have their contrastless, monotone flatland for the powerpoint spivs, and free the rest of the users who need to actually use a computer to create their own with windows that have visible controls and edges >1 pixel wide. they can do what they like with the default UI - the real horror is there's no exit door.

  9. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Flame

    Windows Search

    That has to be the least efficient Search module that has ever been invented.

    I cannot help but imagine that Windows Search has been expressely tweaked by Borkzilla engineers to ensure that, despite every improvement in hardware performance, Windows Search remains just as sluggish as it was in Windows 3.1.

    I disable that monstrosity, and use Everything Search instead. Everything Search is free, it installs in less than half a minute and, once it is done looking through your hard drives, it takes less than 10 milliseconds to find any file name you might be looking for.

    You know, like a proper search function should do in the 3rd Millennium, with computers that are a million times more performant than they were when the 286 came out.

    1. Kennelly

      Re: Windows Search

      Works as a proper search function should in the 3rd millennium?

      After reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_(software) - Security concerns, I'm not so sure about that.

    2. TRT

      Re: Windows Search

      I wanted to access my fuel records that I update every few years or so when I clean out the glovebox. I couldn't remember where I'd put it, but I could remember the file name. Typed that into the search tool and after 10 minutes of a spinning wheel I got bored and decided to try and find it myself. It took me 5 minutes to do that, and when I'd finished updating the document 2 hours later the search tool was STILL spinning away trying to find it.

      1. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

        Re: Windows Search

        Windows Search is useless. If I know any part of the filename I use `dir /s filenamepattern`. It's reasonably fast and works 100% of the time. When MS does away with cmd.exe, it will be time for me to retire. Then I can use GNU-Linux and never have to look at Windows again.

  10. Shred

    I wonder if Microsoft employees actually realise that they’re in the same business as car makers? i.e. Microsoft is primarily a marketing company.

    Every 18 months or so, bring out a “refreshed” model. Some of the black bits are now chrome. Things that had square edges now have rounded edges. Move stuff around for no apparent reason other than making the previous version look old and dated, but annoy the user, who now has to find it again. Now some people feel the need to race out and buy the new model for no apparent reason, other than that it is fashionable and the latest.

    Guess that’s why I use LibreOffice (no toolbars… yay) and drive a 23 year old car.

    1. Antron Argaiv Silver badge

      Some of the black bits are now chrome. Things that had square edges now have rounded edges.

      You forgot: ...and some of the chrome bits are now black. Things that had rounded edges now have square edges...."

      Plus ça change....

  11. The commentard formerly known as Mister_C Silver badge
    Unhappy

    fscking designers - shame they don't inhabit the real world

    "the default neutral color palette, customizable ribbon, and soft corners"

    That'll be pale grey foreground with a mid grey background for the active window. And the background windows are 1/255 of a grey different. With a 1 pixel border so that you can't spot the edges and can't click on them unless you have a gaming mouse (and the motor skills of a gaming champ). And all because screen resolution and real estate are soooo valuable now that we have 4k monitors.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      Re: fscking designers - shame they don't inhabit the real world

      It's to make it gender neutral. Also borders marks differences among windows while all of them are part of a big continuous screen community, there should be no borders between them.

      I also believe Azure must be renamed because it has too much a male shade. MS should rename it "Rainbow" or make it a neutral grey and call it as such.

      That what happens when you apply external ideas to a domain where they do not apply at all.

    2. DJV Silver badge

      Re: fscking designers - shame they don't inhabit the real world

      They should definitely be prime candidates to get early tickets for the B-Ark.

  12. Denarius Silver badge
    Coat

    Once More with Feeling

    and everywhere, intimations of desktop publishing formatting jammed in your face, even in a spreadsheet. If I must use an M$ Office, 97 or 2003 would do fine. However there are alternatives which do work nearly like the Good Old Days (tm) Mines the sabre tooth tiger skin one

  13. Potemkine! Silver badge

    Thanks to the innovative design of Office since the 2007 flavor, I switched to Libre Office at home, and I install this on every home PC on my path.

    So sad many companies are stuck with those $@!*! VBA macros to make the switch.

  14. Sharik
    Happy

    Fluent Design?

    I misread that as "Effluent Design". No, wait, maybe that wasn't a misreading after all.

  15. Michael Habel

    I guess the only Windows ARM Device that, sripngs to mind is the Windows Surface RT. Which I suspect will also not get an update to Windows XI

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Windows XI? Sponsored by China?

  16. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    All this pointless redesign

    And they left the ribbon in.

    They're really not selling this.

  17. El blissett

    Would rather they "visually refreshed" Outlook by completely rebuilding it to be functional, competent, and compatible with actual emails that people send, but that sounds too hard.

  18. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    They need to do something

    After a couple of Crayola versions of Office, I found Office 2016 to be refreshingly clean and nearly understandable. Since then things have gone downhill with the desire to flatten everything. Office 2019, especially Outlook, has become essentially unusable unless you change the theme. Fortunately, I don't have to use it that much.

  19. Quotes
    Coffee/keyboard

    Run Fast

    "This new version of Office," said Microsoft engineering manager Mike Smith, "is designed specifically for the next version of Windows on Arm. It has been recompiled for the Arm architecture to run fast, bring greater memory availability, offer better support for large documents, and maintain compatibility."

    ... because it is always such a struggle to find software that will keep up with my typing skills

    1. TRT

      Re: Run Fast

      That's the Arm up behind your back processor, designed to extort cash from you on a regular basis. Because you wouldn't want anything to happen to all your documents now, would you?

  20. Meeker Morgan

    Is it really "shilling" if what you are pushing is free?

    Open Office. Yes even (or especially) with Windows.

    https://www.openoffice.org/

    1. Dave559

      Re: Is it really "shilling" if what you are pushing is free?

      We'll have none of your "Popular" Front of Judea [1] software here!

      You wanna stick with the People's Front of Judea, LibreOffice is where it's at these days.

      [1] "Splitter!"

  21. ChrisC Silver badge
    Flame

    Whilst they're tinkering with the UI, can they please find somewhere other than the window title bar to shove even more active UI elements? I've got an Excel 365 window maximised on my 1920-wide desktop, and at least half of the titlebar is taken up with stuff which, if clicked on, will do something *other* than what I expect to happen when clicking on a window titlebar based on all the decades-worth of prior experience of using the Windows UI since the days of 3.1. Bad enough that W10 generally makes it harder to even see where the edge of a window is sometimes, but to then, once you've found the title bar, turn it into a minefield of clickable elements, means the O365 team have gone beyond merely adopting the generic W10 approach of UI minimalism at the expense of useability and have chosen to enter a whole new realm of sticking shit in places users don't expect shit to be stuck, just to mess with their expectations and experiences and make it even harder to use the product in ways they want to use it.

    If I then dare to reduce the window width to something more applicable to the amount of data actually in the sheet itself, so that i can, you know, make use of the other side of the screen to display something else at the same time (woo, multitasking, get you Mr flash git power user, goes the entire Windows/Office design team in harmonious unison), whilst some of those titlebar-cluttering elements shrink down a bit, they don't do so quite as rapidly as the reduction in width of the title bar itself, leaving me with now barely a handful of pixels on which I can click without fear of triggering some other UI action.

    And just as a bonus, I've now noticed that clicking in the seemingly completely empty bit of the titlebar to the left of the Autosave toggle, behaves the same as clicking on the program icon that's usually displayed in that position on stuff compiled for older, more sensible, versions of Windows. So, you know, nice to still have that functionality included, but why not make it a bit more obvious. Like, perhaps, I dunno, just a random thought that crossed my mind, no idea what gave me this idea, sticking a scaled-down rendition of the product logo in the corner?

    Godallfuckingmighty, I really, TRULY, despise modern UI design and every last person on the planet responsible for forcing it on the rest of us. First class tickets for the B Ark for the lot of them...

    1. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

      Good rant

      I agree. At least in Excel (not in Outlook) you mitigate it somewhat:

      File | Options | General | [x] Collapse the Microsoft Search box by default

  22. Abominator

    Remember MSN messenger?

    Remember Lync?

    Remember Lync for Business?

    Remember Skype for Business?

    ....and then Teams?

    A decade of more of exponentially increasing shitness, memory bloat and increasing performance issues. Never mind utterly horrible UI's.

    They never fail to make their products dramatically worse.

  23. Nick Ryan Silver badge
    Stop

    Just repeating the same nonsense every time...

    Microsoft has basically tweaked Office to bring it in line with the Windows 11 user interface and its Fluent Design principles

    It's the Operating System's job to render applications. However, Microsoft insists every damn time that they "refresh the look" of Microsoft Office to whatever the current fad in their latest Operating System is, to re-implement all of the window and control rendering within the application rather than let the Operating System do it. It's an ongoing example of rampant stupidity and duplication and is one of the reasons that Microsoft Office is so bloated, slow and unstable and hard to port to any other platform.

    1. Daedalus

      Re: Just repeating the same nonsense every time...

      I remember when MS Office joyfully announced that they would no longer be slaves to the Windows UI and would roll their own instead. You can see a certain sense. As you drop down the scale from the tech-savvy through the fakers to the everyday drones, you realize that allowing change to occur is a bad idea. Even today some poor striver will accidentally change a setting an start thinking their PC is infected and the world is about to end. So fixing the style of the UI, even if it allowed only bland, blander, and blandest choices, made sense. Of course that didn't stop the fungus of designeritis from infecting other aspects, which is how we got the ever-changing, ever-confusing ribbon.

      What really rankled was that the same gang of idiots got to work on Visual Studio. Now that was a crime.

  24. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
    Unhappy

    I have recently had the enlightening experience...

    ...of using Office through Teams and Sharepoint.

    I've also had the opportunity of "simultaneously" editing a document with multiple other users.

    All I can say about the esperience is:

    1. It was the Client's requirement that we do things this way

    2. It was a total clusterf....

    3. Microsoft has a good amount of work to do before they need to worry about "visual refreshing" Office.

    #1 bitch? Adding a line break in Teams, GDrive, or Excel all seem to require different combinations of [Shift,Ctrl, Alt], and ENTER.

    1. Daedalus

      Re: I have recently had the enlightening experience...

      I love the way how, in the face of all common sense and even company policy, people will save a new version of a collaborative document as a new file with some "version" info in the name.

      I also love how comments about why changes were made, or were even necessary, tend to mean something only to the commenter and to anyone telepathically linked up. Or they amount to "Kevin wanted this change"

  25. Daedalus

    Once upon a time...

    I've said this before. MS Word ran on a bog standard Mac in 1990. It did everything you might need to write a coherent, well-structured document (not that people actually want to write such things, ever). You can still do the things that it did in 1990, right down to having to deal with the same annoying bugs (ever try yunching a whole paragraph up past other paragraphs, and then hitting a table?), though they have managed to introduce a few new ones, and obfuscate what used to be simple.

    Of course, a bog standard Mac didn't have 32 Gigs of RAM in 1990. Funny how you now need that to do now what you did then.

  26. Martin Summers

    Windows 11 TPM

    For anyone without a TPM. Most modern Intel and AMD processors have a built in TPM. I've just found and switched on the TPM built in to my processor. It's called Intel PTT, you may need to find where the setting is tucked away in your BIOS. If you enable that and you've got UEFI boot, then you're good to go with Windows 11. Bit of research tonight meant that I don't have to buy one any more. Scalpers be damned!

    1. Nick Ryan Silver badge

      Re: Windows 11 TPM

      Microsoft are insisting that it's TPM 2.0 and many processors, even more current ones, do not provide TPM 2.0, only an older revision.

      1. Martin Summers

        Re: Windows 11 TPM

        I turned it on in my BIOS and both windows insider and the checker tool that I still had a copy of both said my PC now met the hardware requirements. Doesn't hurt to try.

  27. Dave559

    Emulation layer on ARM

    Hmm, that emulation layer on ARM, if they were to make it available for other program developers to use, might it be time to think that Micros~1 might be about to do their own Project Marklar, to keep up with Apple and the way that CPU efficiency seems to be going, and for Intel (and AMD) to start getting very nervous indeed?

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