Microsoft Changes Office 2007 Interface Again 300
daria42 writes "Microsoft has modified its interface for Office 2007 yet again, after complaints from beta testers that the 'ribbon' system took up too much space on screen. The article discusses the resistance the new interface is likely to prompt in old users of the software, both at a personal and corporate level. From a format perspective, there are other changes to expect as well." From the article: "Hodgson also confirmed that Microsoft is working on tools to help enterprises automatically translate existing documents into new file formats being introduced in Office 2007. 'We've been asked by a lot of customers to provide tools to do mass migrations,' he said. 'There will be tools that will take a million documents and migrate those to the new formats.' One likely incentive for that migration will be reduced storage costs. Microsoft claims that file sizes for the new Office 2007 XML-based formats are up to 75 percent less than existing Office formats."
Too much room? (Score:3, Informative)
I like the ribbon.
Re:Too much room? (Score:5, Insightful)
Monitors are wider these days. It's vertical screen real-estate that users will notice more. At least in the old Office versions, I can completely remove toolbars or combine the ones I use into one custom toolbar. The ribbon still bugs me, and making it an auto-hide just adds a step to typical usage.
Nothing was really "broken" about the old system, it just needed more consistency and easier configurability. Changing to a completely new and unproven design just increases training costs for businesses and slows adoption of their new version.
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With that said I'm concerned from what was said about the Ribbon interface... Outlook only occasionally uses it? Visio doesn't at all? Your going to have end users switching back and forth between UI in a package designed to be "all in one"
The idea about using th
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Honestly I think it's good to see them try and revamp a system once in awhile like the menu bar... I always found Office's to be massively confusing for the end user. Is it under Tools | Options? Tools | Customize? File | Page Setup? Tools?
That's because MS had a chimp randomly assign tasks to menu headings. I'd have recommended they get someone with some sense make that more intuitively organized, not re-do the entire thing and add a whole other learning curve.
A million documents? (Score:2, Funny)
Three words: backup, backup, backup
Re:A million documents? (Score:5, Insightful)
Vendor lock-in, Vendor lock-in, Vendor lock-in
As bad as DOC is, at least it's been reverse engineered to death and is compatible with the bulk of most modern word processors.
Re:A million documents? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Bill Gates, 2006.
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Call me old fashion... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure lots of people are gonna respond to that with a resounding "YES", but I personally have gotten used to what it is. It took me years to learn the ins and outs of Office after computers stopped coming bundled with MS Word. Even now, I've done away with that side-by-side view in Outlook 2003 and moved everything back to the same way it was in 2000. This goes the same for most other programs which throw in an abundance of menus and graphics to try to make things TOO user friendly. Nine times out of ten, if there is an option for the "traditional view", I'll take it.
I dunno, maybe I'm just living in the past. I still use vi on Linux, I still use Notepad in windows whenever I can, and I don't feel any desire to get used to any "ribbons" flying across my screen.
--
"A man is asked if he is wise or not. He replies that he is otherwise." ~Mao Zedong
Re:Call me old fashion... (Score:5, Informative)
It's actually very usable when you've learned your way around it (e.g. to edit the header and footer in word you go to the 'insert' tab in Word - hmm?) and many of the old key commands still work, e.g. ALT-E S for 'paste special'. But not in Outlook, bah.
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Besides, let's keep in mind that MS needs to do something to entice the user to upgrade - when 2003 resembles and pretty much works exactly like 97, businesses often feel no incentive to upgrade. But a complete overhaul in the product - both in format (and perhaps ODF support
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I did watch the demo video on the Microsoft site -- and I use the term demo loosely, since half of it was uninformative marketeze -- and I'm afraid I wasn't that impressed. I gave them a fair chance to redeem themselves, but their interactive demo wouldn't play nicely for me, so the video is all I have.
My conclusion, as I've mentioned before [slashdot.org], was simply that it's too much "pretty, pretty" and not enough real changes that actually make a difference to how easy it is to create useful documents. If they're c
Re:Call me old fashion... (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, there is a chance that his thing might actually make your life a lot more comfortable...
Granted, this is Microsoft, so you'd have a point if you said "not very likely", but you should at least give it a try
Using vi isn't a good example of living in the past btw. It may be hideous and horrible and I certainly wouldn't go anywhere near it, but if you know how to use it properly, it's pretty damn useful and will remain so for many years to come.
Notepad on the other hand... has it even learned to do syntax highlighting yet?
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Syntax highlighting? Ha! The thing STILL doesn't even handle unix newline characters properly. I'm not holding my breath for that feature, much less syntax highlighting.
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Re:Call me old fashion... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess these are examples of the ideal way to improve things: you don't have to relearn anything to use the improvement, it's just magically better. A shame that so few software improvements follow this path. I guess improved font rendering, faster speed, or better reliability are examples.
UI upgrades for vehicles (Score:2)
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I haven't tried Word 2007 so I can't say much about it but that particular issue seems to be fixed based on this screenshot [officeblogs.net]. Would you prefer to have a File tab with the page settings und
Re:Call me old fashion... (Score:4, Interesting)
Hardly an appropriate analogy - all of the things you described did not change the user interface - the steering wheel is still a wheel, the brake pedal didn't move to the glove box and there aren't only two tires now instead of four.
Microsoft changes things that don't help - all of the things your described help. If I'm a programmer, I still want power steering in my car. But word by default capitalizes words I don't want capitalized, uncapitalizes things I do, and dissappears menu items.
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It also wrecks the grammar in your internet posts.
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It also wrecks the grammar in your internet posts.
Granted, he misspelled "disappeared", but it's quite legitimate to use it as a verb, though usually in the sense of "Pinochet disappeared the protesters". Sometimes Word does seem rather dictatorial in the way it insists you do things .
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>> anti-lock braking systems, traction control and so on out of your car
>> because you like it the traditional way.
That's a rather strange comparison. I didn't have to teach my parents to find the steering wheel again when they bought their first car with power steering. It just operated more easily, not differently.
Re:Call me old fashion... (Score:4, Interesting)
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With your line of reasoning, we should have never left command line interfaces...
Re:Call me old fashion... (Score:5, Interesting)
The silly thing is that you end up with a mixture of software using different widget styles since the style of menu to display seems to be burned into the executable. Some apps will have old Windows-style grey menu bars, some will have Office 2003 white menus with dropdown shadows, others the slightly different style used in Office 2002, some draggable and some fixed, but they're all doing the same thing. Even a stock installation of Windows with no third-party apps has different styles for window borders between, say, Control Panel and Command Prompt. Surely the sane way to do things is to have a standard Windows interface for 'please make a menu bar', and then when an innovation like draggable menus or hiding unused menu items comes up, it can apply to all applications consistently. Unfortunately I fear that the Win32 API is too low-level for something like that to work.
(NB I'm not implying that the free software world is any better; historically Unix desktops have been far worse than Windows for lacking a consistent look and feel between applications. It's improving, and distributions like Ubuntu are doing sterling work in trying to harmonize look and feel between programs written with different toolkits. At least a Linux system has only one copy of (say) GTK 2.x installed, so when the GTK appearance changes all the 'g' programs remain consistent.)
Some suggest that for Microsoft, the inconsistency in appearance is deliberate. Once you have the new Office 2000+x installed, applications from year x-1 start to look a bit out of date in comparison. You need to upgrade. Get a new version of Windows and your old Office version isn't quite right any more; you get a slightly dirty feeling using such old software that doesn't quite fit with the rest of the desktop; best to go and buy the latest one just to be on the safe side. You can compare this with the car market where styling changes are made from one year to the next to help make the old model look old-fashioned and encourage buyers to trade up.
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Notepad on the other hand... has it even learned to do syntax highlighting yet?
Ahhh, Notepad. So small, so simple. But truly, if you want a really useful notepad (that's also GPL), try Notepad++ [sourceforge.net]. I've made it a standard part of every Windows install.
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for every day driving i use a newer car - why, it has ac and a quite ride.. and if i get hit i have a much better chance
for racing.. i use a 70's MG - why because it doesn't have all that crap in it.. i know exactly how it will react to what i am telling it to do..
for programs.. i would rather have the lean mean version that does wh
Re:Call me old fashion... (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, what a load of shit. Anything that helps keep control of the car, especially in slippery conditions is a good thing. It doesn't take much to slip, even going slow. My car's advanced traction control is pretty good at stopping fishtailing for example.
People need to realise they are steering a couple of tonnes of sheet steel and upholstery at breakneck (50mph) speed. It shouldnt be too easy, and it shouldnt be taken lightly. All these 'driver aids' simply make people more complacent.
No, driving should not be taken lightly, but having safe guards when the unexpected occurs is a good thing. No one will ever drive perfectly.
However, more and more people drive as if the ABS etc are there to be taken advantage of all the time. If on a dry day you see your ABS light flickering all the time as you drive, you are driving too fast and braking too hard.
I know lots of people that have ABS (pretty much everyone I know, actually) and not one of them drives like this. ABS only kicks in when you'd leave a nice little tire streek if your car didn't have ABS. To say that people are just slamming their brakes at every light is absurd. I've seen plenty of shit driving, but no one is purposefully breaking like that for the hell of it.
Please, get over your fear of technology. Its there to help us out, and for the most part it does a very good job.
Re:Call me old fashion... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Big time. (Score:2)
The keyboard shortcuts change whether you're doing something in the OS interface or an application interface.
So someone learning ctrl-b in one app is confused when their focus is on a different app and a different function is invoked.
EVERYTHING else on the market has an interface specifically designed for it. Only computer systems use the keyboard/mouse interface for every application.
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Re:Call me old fashion... (Score:5, Insightful)
I dont care about the interface, I am worried about the new slew of "helpers" they put in there that will do what you dont want them to do, change your formatting, start a bulleted list when you dont want to, "help you" because you are not doing it the microsoft way, etc...
Personally, a word processor that has NO features is perfect. put on the screen EXACTLY what I type, dont screw with my margins, dont adjust my tabstops, etc... Fun part is they make it intentionally hard to disable all that useless crap.
I guarentee that Office 2007 will come with twice the amount of that garbage in it.
Re:Call me old fashion... (Score:4, Interesting)
I guarentee that Office 2007 will come with twice the amount of that garbage in it.
I'm still using MS Office 97 (sans Access) for most of my work. I still have a valid license for it, it does everything I need, and I'm still occasionally discovering some feature I've never looked into before (and every once in a while I find one of those "new" features is worth mastering). All in all, MS Office 97 is a top of the line product, quite rich in features, and much less burdened with crapchrome than more recent office suites.
When OpenOffice matured, I gained an excellent tool for converting newer MS Office formats to the MS Office 97 formats. That has removed the only serious problem I was encountering with MS Office 97. It also gives me an easier migration path to Linux, if and when the time comes to do that. I began using OpenOffice to backport new MS Office formats about 3 years ago.
BTW, I had MS Office 2000 and I've currently got MS Office 2003 available at work and I'm no stranger to them. In fact, I've got a minor reputation for being an Office guru-- I'm occasionally consulted about problems in Excel, Word, or complex document development. More often than not, showing the user how to avoid one of the gee-whizz features in the newer office suite finesses the problem, makes for a happy user, and enhances my guru reputation.
So I'm a very happy MS Office 97 user. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, etc, etc.
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Also, the default configuration moves stuff ar
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Now that PHBs are faced with re-training everyone on the new MS Office, will OO.o be seen as a less difficult transition or will they blindly drink the MS kool-aid?
It's about not being interchangeable with OOo (Score:2)
Here's why (Score:3, Interesting)
Since there was no real set of organizing principles for the evolution of the Office interface, these new toolspaces naturally
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Definately well worth trying.
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75% smaller file formats! (Score:2)
So I wonder what they'll be dropping from the format?
Re:75% smaller file formats! (Score:5, Informative)
The new formats are zipped by default. The zip files do contain the data as XML rather than a binary format which must be a small loss but it's gained back by zipping them.
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Are you aware OpenOffice saves in OpenDocument formats by default?
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No pics (Score:5, Informative)
Articles about GUI's without images make baby Jesus cry. Google gives these [picaday.host.sk] as the old design, hope it helps.
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Superb hosting [tinyurl.com] 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95
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Re:No pics (Score:5, Informative)
Having RTFA, it appears that the "new" GUI is exactly the same, except you can set it to auto-hide, like you can with the system task bar. Why this is front-page news is a mystery to me.
NEWS ALERT! BETA SOFTWARE MAKES MINOR INTERFACE CHANGE! FILM AT 11!
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What's the mystery? Slashdot needs articles like this to stay in business so they can generate ad revenue from frothing-at-the-mouth rabid slashbots. If Slashdot could figure out a way to monitor Bill Gates bowel movement habits and patterns you'd see articles every day day about each one.
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I think it's because it was posted on Digg and a whole lot of people started digging up the story, thinking MS (due to a sensationalist headline on Digg) was doing away with ribbons, hence spawning a flood of story submissions to Slashdot, many submitters still thinking it was something big. This is as little change as a task bar hiding when you don't use it.
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You must be new here. Please, allow me to help you.
The story isn't about a company making a minor interface change in their beta software. No. The story is that an evil entity, one Micro$oft, has again attempted to ram something down unwitting users' throats. Of course, the populace was too smart for that. They threatened to flex their muscles in the marketplace. The evil entity, Micro$oft (in case you forgot), then became a coward and decid
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Sort of like how the Windows task bar has the option for that to conserve a little extra space.
This "change" sparked a whole lot of confusion on Digg as it was believed MS was doing away from the interface, or changing how the ribbons worked. It's in reality just an optional setting to auto-hide them now. There's therefore not really any change to the ribbons themselves, but just when they'll be displayed.
I really don't think such a small
New Document Formats? (Score:2)
Exactly... (Score:2)
And while I haven't tried the new "ribbon" based Office interface, based on screenshots alone the new interface seems to be an improvement. I can understand the complaint that the ribbon method of displaying all of the contextual options takes up
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The problem is that people WON'T and we'll start getting deluged with Office 2007 documents in their crappy proprietary format. Why go and create a completely new document format when there's a perfect ODF format available that will be 100% open with all other office suites that implement it. No more complicated and buggy filters needed to import documents, just write your code to the file spec and you'll see
Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Presumably to make up for the >33% increase in the size of their new software? :)
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It's true, they are smaller (i've been using 2007 for a while now).
The reason they are smaller is they are
Reduced Storage Costs (Score:5, Insightful)
Judging from past conversions, you'd better keep the original version close at hand, because when the conversion doesn't look right, you're going to have people wanting the original. So now you're dealing with 25% more storage - the original files as a safety copy, and the new 'improved' conversions. Hmmm.
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Tie a ribbon around me - I'm hooked (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been using Word for about 10 years and have come to know its little foibles and workarounds and sub-sub-sub menus. That being said, the SECOND time I used Word 2007 I was able to teach others how to use it! It's an absolute triumph of GUI design and I'm really enthusiastic about its final release. I'm also dreading the coming of February when my free beta expires and becomes unusable.
And on the topic of mass migration - don't go nuts with that, Microsoft. Even if a company wants to implement Office 2007 among its entire ranks, interoperability with other shops who will be reluctant to upgrade (due to cost of licensing and training) will mean that
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They aren't. They aren't touching the ribbons with this change, just letting users with an optional option (yes, really!) hide the ribbons when you don't use it. Why that would imply a change in how ribbbons work is beyond me. The story tell the ribbons have been a success among many testers, and in response to some concerns they could be slimmed a bit better, MS is now adding this option.
*gets flashback from Digg and people not readin
Feature dropping (Score:2)
They just can't seem to make their minds up about their feature sets! Hey Microsoft, take a page from Apple's book: don't announce features until you're SURE they're going into the product!!!
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From TFA:
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You may like the interface of 2000, but you've got to admit that it's not the most logically-arranged system possible. The ribbon seems to be moving in the direction of an easier-to-understand interface, and I'm all for that.
Office 2k7 has had no features dropped (Score:2)
See Jensen Harris' blog entry of a July 20 for accurate info:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/20/6 72345.aspx [msdn.com]
I swear, the tech media is getting worse and worse with their misleading, inaccurate, and shallow stories.
I can't get over this. (Score:2, Interesting)
And call it a ribbon, so it's a new feature that suddenly compels people to purchase the software?
To the obtuse jackass who modded me flamebait: (Score:3, Insightful)
What it hasn't done is give anyone any compelling reasons to upgrade. Someone needs to explain precisely how this "ribbon" feature adds value. What does it say about the pro
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Hang on. (Score:3, Insightful)
I really hate the UI changes in each version of Office and wish there was a "classic" setting that causes a default skin to be displayed with everything in a standardized spot. Why? Because when my mother/sister/neighbour's cat purchases a new computer it inevitably comes with a new version of Office that has features senselessly 'hidden' in different spots. It causes no end of agony to help these poor users adapt. After all, most people need little more than a glorified typewriter with spell-checking. Microsoft should offer "Office Extrasimple Basic" for folks like these.
Of course, they'd market it in a way that encouraged people to upgrade "just in case they need the ability to do something powerful."
XML FTW (WTF) (Score:5, Funny)
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-----------
* -- Find a way to shrink pr0n storage by 75% and you may have something, though.
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I realize you're going for funny, but this isn't true. This paper [idealliance.org] evaluates a number of XML compression techniques. They compared binary formats to uncompressed XML to compressed XML. The paper states that "three methods compressed the XML to less than the size of the corresponding binary file." One of the best compression approaches is XMill [sourceforge.net].
This is what I've always said about ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Many people claim to be sick of MS and the intrusiveness and high costs of being legal, but when they try Linux they complain that it's not Microsoft.
Well, now it looks like, with this new Ribbon thing, users will complain because, according to the article, there will be inconsistency between MS applications - some will have the ribbon, some won't.
It's not even whether or not the ribbon is a bad thing, it's that people don't like learning new things.
ARRG It's called a visual (Score:2)
It's a story about a new UI
Almost as bad as the stories linked to by fark
Tom
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It's like writing a 1000 word story on "that weird sound heard over in Orange county" then not actually having the clip of audio. In this day and age I think we can at least put a screenshot up of a new UI.
Tom
Ribbons, menus... seriously, c'mon (Score:5, Insightful)
In any given hour of work in Word or Excel, do you know how often I use menus, buttons or anything outside the actual document/worksheet space? Maybe once or twice for Word, maybe only a little more for Excel. The reason? Shortcuts, people, shortcuts.
How office-monkeys can sit in their Dell Hells day after day, doing the same crap over and over again, without learning
a) to touch type and
b) how to do things a bit quicker and easier with the keyboard
is absolutely beyond me.
What do I need from my UI? Leave it as it is. I have exactly two toolbars in either Word or Excel, and use a fraction of each (if I'm that concerned about screen space, I'll customise more carefully). Anything beyond my capabilities with keyboard and the odd button, I will happily use a menu for. Anyone who tells me how much easier and more intuitive Ribbons are to use, I say this: I've tried it, and I found them exactly as useful as the current UI, ie not at all.
No, this is not a "I don't need no stinkin' upgrades" rant. This is a "For God's sake, people, learn to use the tools you have properly and you'll work quicker, easier and not give a damn about this either" tirade.
Google Video of new UI (Score:5, Informative)
Nice, but not enough (Score:2)
In essence, they're stuck: it's still a word processor, spreadsheet
Doc takes 4 times the storage of XML?!?!? (Score:2)
Two possibilities:
1. It is not XML at all. It is highly compressed, encrypted, obfuscated, binary data sitting between XML tags. Make sure no body can read/write these fi
GroupBar & Scalable Fabric - MS Research (Score:3, Interesting)
GroupBar: I love this product, especially once I started playing around with some of the options. Why the current Windows taskbar doesn't incorporate all these functions is beyond me. Note: there is no shortcut created anywhere by the installer, go into \program files\microsoft research\groupbar and run from there. Scalable Fabric: I found this is the more interesting approach, however it's a buggy implementation and only good for playing around with. Jonah HEX
old news (Score:3, Informative)
I like the Ribbon (Score:3, Interesting)
Real world PDF vs OpenXML size comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
I've just downloaded the just released ECMA Draft 1.4 OpenXML Specs [ecma-international.org]. They are 5 files, available in both DOCX (the OpenXML version of DOC) and PDF.
The PDF files are 4 to 7 times larger than the DOCX files (except for the "Part 3 - Primer" doc, where the PDF file is only 1.2 times larger than the corresponding DOCX file).
For the main file, "Part 4 - Markup Language Reference", the PDF version is is 42MB and the DOCX version is 10MB.
Just adding some perspective.
interface is good (Score:3, Interesting)
i install it in my laptop and when other people see it, they find it cool that they would also like to get a copy of it. but alas, microsoft started charging for the download of the software. i was lucky to have it before (the product key is not transferrable to other computers by the way.)
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<moods>
<!--<happy>-->
<!--<cheerful>-->
<annoying as f***>
</moods>
It goes on like this for quite a while. The most notable thing in the file is the commented out options. If only they had implemented the Clippy options tab.
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/^\
| |
@-@|
|U||
\v/
</stupid_annoying_prick>
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Re:What about the bloat? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course, Microsoft would never have an 'office light' - an Office which was compatible with the full MS Office, but had low system requirements and just the core wordprocessor and spreadsheet functions because it'd cannibalize the full version's sales!
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Yes! I couldn't agree more.
Back in the day I used Word 2.0 as pretty much my main application for all types of word processing tasks and layout stuff. It mostly worked despite the size of hard disks, RAM and processors back then. However, the time taken to start up your PC and open a document
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Are you kidding? I remember running Office 2000 on my Pentium 166 with 64mb RAM, and it chugged along happily. I even tried installing Office 2003 on it, didn't seem like it was bad. It was too far out of date to be used, but Office 2003 didn't seem to complain.