Refreshing: An Office update that won't frighten the horses Microsoft's much-trumpeted "visual refresh" for its suite of Office applications has begun making its way out to users enrolled in the Insider programme, last night slithering onto both the Windows 11 Intel and ARM test setups at Vulture Central. To be fair, our Arm setup consists of a Raspberry Pi-400 running a preview of …
That's innovation!
First utterly b*ggering up the UI and then gradually re-introducing sanity and claim to improve productivity, productivity that was never lost in the first place amongst the people who jumped to LibreOffice the moment they introduced the ribbon (which includes me, btw).
What a herd of conmen.
But you are still stuck with it as a GUI, which sucks. One of the things I like about LibreOffice is that new ideas are always OPTIONAL, and not that "our way or the highway" approach used by Microsoft by ramming each alleged *cough* "innovation *cough* down the throat of its users.
Given available options, using the ribbon strikes me as a public expression of masochistic tendencies, pardon the pun.
Yup, that includes me.
That said, for me the switch to LibreOffice was very easy because I had been using it in parallel with Word for years - it was the only way to fix the problems that Word kept introducing.
As a matter of fact, I was known in my team for my ability to fix documents that were complex enough to make Word crash. All I did was load them into LibreOffice which would silently ignore all the formatting problems that Word introduced due to its abysmal cut & paste which littered format code fragments all over the place, and then save it again. For extra beer I'd also restyle it, but eventually I had all of them using styles like they were meant to be used which also cut down on time.
And then came the ribbon, and I spent about two days with it before I decided to stop wasting time, and remained with LibreOffice as main application. As the company I was with was regrettably a Windows house I imported my work into Word at about the last action of the process: tidying up and topping and tailing it.
My jump to LibreOffice was for the same reason as we introduced Linux into the Enterprise when Windows could not keep up a decent file & print service for more than a few hours: I had work to do, and I don't have that weird Microsoft fetish. I use what works, full stop.
@Pascal Monett "I've had so many people thank Borkzilla for having completely erased their long-acquired keyboard shortcut habits."
Did they erase them? I ask because short cuts are there in Word so did Microsoft changed them? They look the same to me but I am a light user of Word.
BTW if you leave the pin off on the ribbon it acts just like a menu the ribbon drops down when to click on the main menu item much like a dropdown menu.
Trouble is the ribbon (and Windows 8 onwards) MS have largely removed the visual cues as to what the shortcuts are.
Likewise gone are the handy keyboard overlays that MS supplied with their office products up to Office 4.2.
From the screen shots it seems MS haven't extended the Edge option to switch between vertical and horizontal tabs/menus.
@Roland6 the visual cues are there for short cuts just hit the alt key but instead of underlined letter of the menu option there is a sort of tool tip that shows the short cut keys.
I agree keyboard overlays were handy and Microsoft weren't the only software company to do overlays. But nowadays seems hardly anyone does them.
BTW you don't have to memorise short cut keys as they have a letter underscore pre ribbon and now have a tool-tip
@Falmari - the tool tip only displays if you hover; something I don't do very often and if I do its more to confirm what the action is.
The alt key is interesting, I suspect if we didn't have mice then we would continue to access the menus via the alt key and so see and learn the shortcut codes. As it is, by using the mouse, I never get to see the shortcut codes and thus get familiar with them...
@Roland6 the visual cue you get when you press the alt key now now look like tool tips before the ribbon it was an underlined character in the menu item or button text etc.
BTW how those visual cues are done in the ribbon to my eye they don't look nice and I am sure MS could have stuck with the underline. But the visual cue is still there.
Yes, they changed a *lot* of them which is what drove professionals away.
Up and including the 2003 series, MS Office applications had a menu structure which actually educated users about the shortcuts that were set (LO does this as well, by the way, and updates that just as well as Word used to when you changed them). So, to speed up your specific workflow, you started to observe what often used commands had as shortcut and started using that which gives you dramatic speed gains as you no longer have to take your hands off the keyboard (also far less RSI potential). Especially pro writers do this as it saves them a lot of time.
This creates muscle memory that you can't just undo quickly - it takes weeks to "unlearn" (with the added problem that some even do something different you will have to undo) and then relearn whatever they cooked up with, especially since these shotcuts existed for years. Whichever moron approved that ought to be given to the BOFH for percussive or gravitational education, but that's just my opinion.
Hence LibreOffice, and hence also MS switching to subscritions to keep the mulah rolling in.
I've still got clients deliberately running older versions of macOS so they can run Office 2011. They take one look at 'Microsoft 360' * and decide na!
*for new readers of El Reg, it's called '360' because at leat 5 days a year you won't be able to access it or your work (unless you are sensible and keep a LOCAL copy).
I’ve been using the ribbon since Office 2007 was launched back in 2006. That’s 15 years. And I still can’t get used to it. Like I search for an email, find it, hit reply, and then…. Where the FUCK is the send button? Oh yes, it’s on the ‘Home’ ribbon tab thing, so I have to click that first. WTAF? Microsoft - why wouldn’t I want to hit send while writing an email? Why would I want to search again??? You can see I’ve found what I want, and I’m replying to it!
And they say AI is going to take over!
Which isn't very helpful as Microsoft Teams trains in the muscle memory that CTRL+Return is a newline.
I've almost sent many an unfinished draft due to that.
To reduce mindless "ok" responses, non spell checked emails, and follow ups that say "oh, sorry, I meant Y not X: it would be much better if it was slightly harder to send an email, in my opinion.
@anthonyhegedus "Where the FUCK is the send button? Oh yes, it’s on the ‘Home’ ribbon tab thing"
Well no wonder you can't find the send button as it is not on the "‘Home’ ribbon tab thing" it is at the top of the email to the left of the From, To and Cc buttons. Just where you would expect it so you can "hit send while writing an email".
Well I won't be getting it, nor any updates to Office ever – not since I rolled back to a time before the absolutely f#cking awful "Modern Comments" feature (and I'm not the only one who hates it, judging by the reams of negativity in that thread). As a professional editor, it's utterly f#cked my workflow and made everything I do painfully slower and less versatile. If they ever allow me to opt out of this "modernity", then maybe I'll allow updates. Meantime, I'm just going to have to take the risk.
What Windows 11 does with Office frightens this particular horse.
Specifically, Windows 11 installs a cloud version of Office, completely overriding any version of Office that happens to be in the system already.
At least it is easy to restore Windows 10 and re-install Office 2016.
So it's basically bigger then.. What is is with modern screen designers and their fascination with whitespace?
All the new "Improved" page designs (I'm looking at you IMDB) seem to have been made for myopic children... Massive rounded borders, huge fonts, reams of completely useless padding between every sentence and between every container...
It's getting old already and they still think it's new. Please bring back space efficient, logical design!
I fail to see the fascination with each new version of an app using more and more of the screen for less and less information.
Firefox, now office. There was a time when developers were frugal with screen space. NOW...... well it seems that they want to spread the stuff around the screen.
It is time to sort this out.
I mean, windows 11 putting the start menu in the middle of the screen.
Taking another 30% of space, why, because they need to justify their existence.
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