Atex Desk Reviews

Summary: The overall experience is one of sheer frustration, 'computer rage', and the desire to throw one's laptop out of the nearest window. Desk is a broken, buggy, nightmarish mess to use and is COMPLETELY UNFIT FOR PURPOSE.
To think that not so long ago I had my own Adobe InDesign, and could actually do my job properly and intuitively, sorting out any problems with pages as I worked.
Now all the control I previously had has been taken away. I cannot directly interact with page elements, and any problems that occur must be sent on to a third party who have InDesign to sort out.
Even simple operations such as the need for a second picture box, or a landscape pic to be made into portrait are now beyond my capability - unless I wish to go through the convoluted rigmarole of unassigning all content, killing off the template, trawling through the system for a more suitable template, loading it in, loading the story back onto the page blah blah - though of course 8 times out of 10 there are no suitable templates!
So sum up, Desk has made my job into an unpleasant, frustrating, chore.
Operations that would have previously taken me around three minutes now can take anything upward of 20 minutes or even longer - radically increasing my workload and working hours.

Positive: I've been doing this job for over 20 years and Desk is by a country mile, the single worst editorial system I have ever had the misfortune of having forced upon me, and I am comparing this directly with the first system I used back in 2002, which was a totally command-driven system operating under MS DOS, but had 80% more flexibility and functionality.

Negative: Constant, and almost ceaseless crashes, lock-ups, errors and freezes.
Slow to the point of ridiculousness. Takes forever to open pages, edit copy, load in pictures etc. And it usually takes several attempts to load things in as the first few attempts invariably fail.
Extremely limited functionality. No method of changing the point size of text, no method of changing text colour, no method of kerning, tracking options extremely limited. Picture cropping tools are a total and complete joke - and that's on the rare occasions they actually work.
Every single function and event generally requires multiple mouse clicks and opening multiple screens to achieve, there are no shortcuts, no workarounds. In most situations it's required to have several iterations of Desk open in different browser tabs simply in order to do your job.
Horrible, buggy, unintuitive user interface.