Shiny

[naomikritzer]

I have a new computer.

It's running XP -- I've heard nothing about Vista that's made me want to make the switch -- but I have new versions of pretty much everything else, from Office to the LJ posting client. I tend to be upgrade-phobic and thus was running incredibly outdated versions of Firefox, Acrobat Reader, etc. on my old computer. I'm hardly going to port over outdated software when it's easier to download the new versions, though, so whee! new stuff!

The funny thing is that the interface for the new LJ client looks basically like Word, while the interface for Word looks like...I don't know what the hell it looks like. Not like Word.

Comments

[joxn.livejournal.com]

The new Office interface is something of a you-love-it-or-you-hate-it proposition. I happen to love it, because my mode of understanding how to use a computer (or any given program) is based on capability. I expect that a spreadsheet ought to be able to do X, Y, or Z; and I have similar expectations with a word processor. I think the new ribbon interface meshes really well with that approach to computer functionality. (Dave likes the new interface too, and his description of why sounded a lot like what I just articulated.)

However-on-the-other-hand the people I know whose mode of understanding how to use a computer is mostly procedural (i.e., their understanding of how to accomplish any given task is nearly a sequence of locations to click and buttons to check, much like a pre-recorded macro) are driven absolutely batty by Office 2007.

The story that I heard (from someone on the Office team responsible for soliciting customer input on upcoming versions of Office) was that when they were planning Office 12, they asked customers what the most important features were that they wanted to see in the next version; eight of the top ten features listed were features Office already had. That's when they realized they had a user interface problem, not a problem of not-enough-features. Hopefully people will be able to tolerate being driven batty long enough to give the ribbon a chance.

[naomikritzer]

There was a time when I was one of the 2% of users that actually used the desktop publishing features of Word -- this would've been back in the early 1990s, when I was writing documentation at Carleton. They weren't about to buy PageMaker for the student worker, so beating desktop publishing functionality out of Word was my only option. (Well, I suppose I could've used TeX, but that would've been inconvenient when I was writing a document about Word.)

These days, I use maybe 5% of Word's features. The vast majority of my word processor use is writing fiction, and fiction publishers prefer output that looks like it came from a typewriter. Seriously, you're supposed to put it in Courier, with underlining instead of italic, straight quotes and apostrophes, a double hyphen instead of an m-dash, etc. I have heard no good explanation for this except that editors are luddites.

Anyway, I want my word processor to put the features I use somewhere I can get to them, or else make it easy to customize toolbars so I can give myself a double-space button, and I want it to stay the hell out of my way.

The new interface is really pretty. I haven't tried it out yet to see in what ways it annoys me, though...

You got that right...

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

It's stunning.

[corinnethewise.livejournal.com]

I know it took me freaking 20 minutes to figure out how to save my document. couldn't find the file menu and it didn't have a button at the top of the screen. Why, why is is it so hard to do basic basic basic things?

[winterswitchery.livejournal.com]

I was loathe to go to Vista. And told my husband to immediately wipe it and install XP. However, I gave it 24 hours, and it's basically XP, just prettier. After you switch off most of the "ZOMG are you SURE you want to do this function?" alerts, it's one of the best operating systems I've run.

[mngwinn.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

I'm actually really fond of Vista, even with the security warnings. The biggest problem with Vista is that it has this nasty burn-in period where all the security/predictive caching/etc. doesn't work with the way you use your machine for a week or so. And so it makes an extremely bad first impression. After that's over, it's great.

Did you get OneNote in whatever version of Office you ended up with? It's startling good software.