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Claude
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Back to a start

Post by Claude »

but will it help ?
Cheers, Claude.

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StuartR
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Re: Back to a start

Post by StuartR »

I dislike Windows 8 so much that I am delaying replacing some completely worn out PCs for as long as possible.
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Claude
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Post by Claude »

We've had Windows ME to help us over the Y2K bug, we've had Vista to help us appreciate XP, and now we've got W8 to help us migrate to Windows 7 Pro.

Problem, as always in casa "Microsoft Way 1" is that the marketing department budget is greater than the developers, hence the former wins. Ahh well, at least the bean counters are happy, never mind the users...
Cheers, Claude.

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Rudi
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Post by Rudi »

With everything new there is are skeptics and complaints, BUT if you just put your head down and try the product, you eventually get used to it. I am not saying that people cannot have opinions, but with everything in life, there is change, and if you don't change, you get left behind! I've been using Win8 for a while now and its fine?! I don't even miss the start button anymore. IMHO there was way too much hype and rant about Win8. People must just get used to it... :grin:
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Rudi

If your absence does not affect them, your presence didn't matter.

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StuartR
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Rudi wrote:...People must just get used to it...
I am planning to ignore it and hope it goes away!
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Claude
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Re: Back to a start

Post by Claude »

Most of my clients still use Office 2003 because:

a:) It does everything they need.
b:) They know exactly where everything is.
c:) They don't need to waste uncountable hours of frustrations trying to find out where the powers to be have hidden the most basic commands that they are used to using, without the need to employ a search party to complete the most menial tasks.

I've just installed 3 PCs on a customer site which meant that they upgraded from Office 2010 to 2013: Productive time has been reduced by about 85% because the three operators are trying to figure out how to do the most menial tasks they did last week without problems.

There is progress by evolution and there is progress by marketing, I rather have the former. :sigh:
Cheers, Claude.

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HansV
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Re: Back to a start

Post by HansV »

they upgraded from Office 2010 to 2013: Productive time has been reduced by about 85%
If they had already been using Office 2010, that's strange - the ribbon hasn't been changed all that much between Office 2010 and Office 2013.
Now, from Office 2003 to Office 2013 is something else: the change is huge. But people do get used to the ribbon.

I'm not a big fan of the ribbon interface, and Microsoft made some very bad design decisions in my opinion, but despite boatloads of criticism, the ribbon is not going away - on the contrary, other software manufacturers are slowly adopting it too.

Eventually, staying with old versions of Office and Windows is going to be difficult because they aren't supported any more, have unpatched security holes etc. So most of us will have to bite the bullet sooner or later...
Best wishes,
Hans

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Claude
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Post by Claude »

HansV wrote:If they had already been using Office 2010, that's strange - the ribbon hasn't been changed all that much between Office 2010 and Office 2013.
Now, from Office 2003 to Office 2013 is something else: the change is huge. But people do get used to the ribbon.
You don't know my customers :evilgrin:
So most of us will have to bite the bullet sooner or later...
Agreed.

IMHO, the ribbon was, when introduced, an attempt to cater for touch-screen computers.

Touch-screen is fine on mobiles and tablets, but, who wants to clean their work screen twice a day to get rid of all the takeaway leftovers after the breaks ? Hence, few touch-screens in the workplace, at least where I reside. :shrug:
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Post by HansV »

Windows 8 is definitely intended for use with touch screens, but I don't think it was a driving force for developing the ribbon. Microsoft started working on the ribbon immediately after Office 2003 was finished, i.e. some ten years ago. At that time, smart phones and tablets with touch screens weren't on the radar for Microsoft.

They were feeling that the menu/toolbar interface was becoming too complicated to maintain and expand.

While the concept of menus is quite old, and there were prototypes in the 1970's (Xerox Park), the first large scale application of the menu interface was on the Apple Lisa and Apple Macintosh in the mid 1980's. The first Macintosh applications had relatively few features, and the menu interface worked very well with those.

As we all know, the feature set of the Office applications has grown tremendously over the years, and developers were struggling to find a place for all those features in the menu/toolbar interface. Some features were buried in a submenu of a submenu of a submenu, and some had ended up in very illogical places.
Task panes were intended to aid users, but they were rather impopular.

Reorganizing the menu/toolbar structure would have brought only temporary relief, and users probably wouldn't have accepted it. So the Office team decided to create a radically different interface. After much experimentation, they came up with the ribbon.
Unfortunately, they made a muddle of it. The first implementation, in Office 2007, was just as illogical as the menu/toolbar interface; the 2010 version was a lot better, but still not ideal. And customizing the ribbon is much harder than customizing the menus and toolbars.
The functionality of the ribbon has not changed in Office 2013, but the look-and-feel has been changed slightly to go with the general Windows 8 look - not an improvement to my eyes...
Best wishes,
Hans

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Argus
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Rudi wrote:People must just get used to it... :grin:
I tried the Developer beta, the Consumer Preview, and the Release Preview every now and then for almost a year; I still don't like Windows 8. Period.

MS is well known for sloppy UIs, i.e. not being 100 %; in for example Windows XP, in the Control Panel Font application's import dialogue we see some Windows 3 folder tree ...; in Windows 8 it's a mix of this and that. And it's not only a mix of UI; some settings are split between the Control Panel and PC settings (in the "Modern UI") etc.

They have now included an icon that takes you to the start screen so that they can say that they have listened to the feedback. Not much changed there. I did not like the Unity UI in Linux Ubuntu, it's the same here. And search is now the primary means of navigation; type the name of the software in a :censored: search box. I don't want to search for things I often use, I know where they are. And apparently the default in the new 8.1 is to search everywhere, including the Internet; how about that, privacy etc.

Some people say: "you can pin it to the Taskbar, or put a link on the Desktop. Yes, the Taskbar is a good place for some of it, as in Windows 7; but the Desktop ... some of us try to keep that place nice and tidy. Quite easy if you have a working start menu.

Let's get some things straight here; it's not all about the start button, when it comes to complains, but I think MS also would agree, 8.1 adds more things. Still, in Windows 8 the Desktop is so clean that people can’t even find their files, or a way to start (Windows) Explorer, the Control Panel etc. I had no such problems when I tried the beta, neither with closing the session. But many people don't know all shortcuts; try talking an older relative through all kinds of steps in Windows 8 before calling it progress. There is no end to all bad things with Windows 8; scrolling sideways on a desktop computer, an UI aimed at touch screens etc.

Guess Windows 8 is fun if you are between 10 and 30; or accept anything that comes from Redmond. As mentioned in the BBC video, and elsewhere, some are predicting that we will see other operating systems overtake Windows on consumer machines. With the options that are out there, and coming, one would think that MS would tread more carefully.

As for the ribbon: (I've been using, for example, every Excel version since 2; i.e. 2; 3; 4; 5; 7, a.k.a. 95; 8, a.k.a. 97, 9; a.k.a. 2000; 10, a.k.a. XP; 11 a.k.a. 2003; 12 a.k.a. 2007; and 14, a.k.a. 2010, and some very minor releases such as 7.0a, some different versions 2.0 etc.) I complained, together with many others, over at Jensen's UI blog during the 2007 beta.

There was indeed a long overdue need to do something to Office's much cluttered options dialogues and some other dialogues. MS said that most of their, or at least many, support questions etc. or suggestions for new features were about features already there, people had just not found them. (We all know that some, or, rather quite many, people do not read the help files etc.). My first reaction to the ribbon was that it was the equivalent of pouring the content of my desk's drawer on top of the desk, all in one mess. But even then, everything can't be on the top of the pile.

With Office 2010 they finally got several things right; we can control the ribbon; arrange and add tabs, change the items that appear on the tabs (and several other things got way better than in Office 2007; Office 2013, on the other hand, is a joke; some things are gone in the UI, even the exit option; MS is going minimalistic à la Windows 8 with Office 2013).
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Argus
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Re: Back to a start

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Argus wrote:Still, in Windows 8 the Desktop is so clean that people can’t even find their files, or a way to start (Windows) Explorer, the Control Panel etc.
Well, harrumph, Explorer (both of them) is pinned to the Taskbar on a fresh installation; I must have been looking in some other direction, than the screen, when I typed that. :grin:

Still, the most basic tasks become a pain; hiding a link to the CP, shutdown, logout etc. in a right-click (or Winkey-X) context menu together with more esoteric things such as Disk Management, and that's after the update to 8.1; before that shutdown was only found in the new Charms bar, unless using Alt-F4. (There are, and anything else would be a great surprise, several improvements in Windows 8, but for some reason MS must take one step forward and two steps backwards. (By the way, it seems like they have moved the Libraries out of focus in 8.1; apparently they confused some people.))
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Claude
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Re: Back to a start

Post by Claude »

Argus wrote:apparently they confused some people.
Nooooo ! I find that impossible to believe :evilgrin:
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Argus
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Re: Back to a start

Post by Argus »

Confusion seems to be the theme for Windows 8, so I don't think they have managed to reduce it by moving Libraries to the background. Maybe they are confusing another group of users. :grin: We have apps, and then we have app apps. They are calling everything from an alarm app in the Modern UI to Word or Excel apps. (Occasionally they add a prefix, desktop app, modern app, but that's rare.)
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HansV
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Re: Back to a start

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Argus wrote:We have apps, and then we have app apps.
I gather you're not 'appy about that! :grin:
Best wishes,
Hans

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Argus
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Re: Back to a start

Post by Argus »

Mmm, it doesn't seem appropriate ...
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