Re: Alternitive word 2003 menus for office 2007:
- From: Alex Midence <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 23:02:30 -0500
I'd be going seriously off topic if I listed everything. Boiled down, it's
just got a totally different feel to it than previous versions of Office. I
actually use Excel mostly and Word occasionally. I find the ribbon tool bar to
be illogical and so different from the previous menus that it has been like
learning a whole new piece of software. One example, used to be, if I wanted
to rename a sheet in Excel, I'd go to the edit menu(Alt+e, get it? e for edit),
arrow down to sheet submenu or hit h to jump right to it, right arrow and move
down to rename or hit r. Now, you have to hit alt+h (which I still think of as
help menu deep down), then o then r I think. Sorry, I'm at home and you can
bet I don't have 07 here. That's just one example of how different the whole
interface is. I'm having a hard time memorizing the new stuff and forgetting
to use the old stuff. You find yourself using the context menu a lot where
before you'd just zip on through the pull down menus. You can't even use the
arrow keys the same in the ribbon. YOu have to use tab a lot so it acts like a
cross between a weird menu and a dialog box but, you activate it with the alt
key so you're totally thrown off. I'm sure the software itself works fine.
I'm also sure the folks at Freedom Scientific did a good job making Jaws work
well with it. I just didn't figure a learning curve into my calculations when
my pc was upgraded. I've been using some incarnation of office since the 90's
and it's been a smooth transition from one version to another every time until
now. If I had lots of time to kil and didn't have deadlines and such to meet,
I wouldn't mind near as much. And as for yelling at Microsoft, plenty of
people have and in industries like journalism, education, and all sorts of
disciplines like the medical field and research groups that use Office to draft
up the information they share. Their answer is that the ribbon is here to stay
as are all the automated features in Office. I haven't had experience with
this yet but, apparently, in heavily formatted documents, Word tries to think
for you and makes it nigh on impossible for you to take control of your own
machine. If you're an ex Dos, unix, and vacs user like me, you like being in
total control of what's going on with the computer and you tend to resent
software that tries to second guess you and take steps accordingly while you
pound your keyboard in vain to try and make it stop. It all boils down to
Microsoft redesigning their Office Suite from the ground up to the point that
users of prior versions are as lost as newbies in some instances. If they were
going to do that, they should've renamed it Office the Next Generation
/generation 2 or something to make a clear demarkation between the old and the
new so people would've had a hint that something was up. Of course, that
would've hurt sales because Microsoft Office is a recognized trademark and it's
extremely popular. Any deviation from it would not be as well-received by
returning customers which, seeing as how it's ubiquitous in white collar jobs,
is a lot of people. Ok, this really got way way longer than I meant for it to.
Very sorry. My last word on the subject, I promise.
Alex
----- Original Message -----
From: p.wildcat1234@xxxxxxxxx
To: jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, May 22, 2009 10:00 PM
Subject: Alternitive word 2003 menus for office 2007:
Hi Alex What is wrong with 2007?
I ordered office 2007 and it works well with jaws.
Yah They shouldn't have put that ribon in the program to replace the file
menu but I'll leave that suggestion for you to yell at microsoft about.
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