« Firefox updated but Add-ons lagging behind | Main | An example of good hardware design »
Outlook 2007 email controversy
One of the major changes in Outlook 2007 had nothing to do with the Ribbon but that Word was used to display and edit emails.
On the face of it, there are good reasons for this, though mostly if the majority of emails are sent between people using Office2007 (a fair assumption in an office). You can include SmartArt, charts and formatting is easier with the Mini Toolbar.
The problems start when emails start to come from people who don’t use Outlook 2007, myself included thinking of our weekly newsletter. In fact I’d been doing some unrelated research work and the feature comparison between Outlook 2003 and 2007 doesn’t look kindly on the new version.
With Office 2010 on the way, Microsoft confirmed that Word 2010 would be used for emails, prompting an online campaign at fixoutlook.org, complete with a Twitter feed.
Microsoft responded, claiming that Word is “the best e-mail authoring experience around” and linking to a white paper explaining the benefits.
What caught my eye in the paper were the features that won’t be available if Word 2007 is not installed on the computer: auto-formatting, native table functionality, background spell checking, thesaurus, grammar checking, autotext.
Personally, it’s the results that count, and I’m not happy that quite a few CSS standard formatting marks aren’t supported such as background-image. Perhaps the answer is to improve Word.
What bugs me the most is, that Microsoft has so much monopoly over what is inside people's computers.
And a person comes up "help me figure out how this office program works"
And I have to learn 10 different versions, because on has office 2003, one has office 2007 and found one with office xp...
And all work very differently.
Instead of inhancing office with the current interface, they are so busy making a new interface.
Office 2007 is 180degrees different than office 2003. I hope in office 2010 there will be a choice of "conventional interface" vs "The ribbon interface" for the user.
Like advanced and light features most other programs have.
posted-by Johnny | July 2, 2009 8:01 AM
For those of us who have spent years designing standards-compliant websites, only to have to devote 60% of our time simply trying to work around the countless Internet Explorer bugs, this comes as absolutely no surprise. It would not be an understatement to say my job would be twice as easy and efficient if I didn't have to cater to Microsoft's IE rendering bugs. I start to wonder if they do it deliberately.
posted-by Steve | July 4, 2009 3:36 PM
Hey these are not failings they're features designed to keep you in servitude to the latest upgrades. That's the MS way of doing things instead of fixing old problems they create new.
posted-by B Frank | July 5, 2009 9:23 PM
I totally agree with the above comments. I have 2 laptops and each has a different version of MS Office (2003 & 2007). The latter was the only one supplied with my new computer so I had no choice. Why can't MS just improve the program but leave operations etc within alone so that we can all use the same versions. It is up to us to update as necessary not be dictated to by the manufacturer. I constantly have to remember to save documents in 2003 format because none of my friends or relatives have 2007 versions.
posted-by Richard Jones | July 7, 2009 9:39 AM
Why always this? its not fine. Choose something else to talk about.
posted-by Nashville Limo | July 11, 2009 1:51 AM