At work I'm still amazed how many customers use Excel for text documents.
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Why is MS-Word 2016 so dumb?
- Thread starter Mystery member
- Start date
M
malch
Guest
As one who still uses Office 2000, I have to agree.
It's really not hard to understand why. Office upgrades represent a massive revenue stream. Hence the need to constantly add features and changes to keep that gravy train on the rails, whether they're necessary/wanted or not.
I did think the subscription pricing might lead to better quality software products but have seen little if any compelling evidence of that so far.
My theory is that Word is so bad at creating tables that many people feel more comfortable with Excel.
When I need a table, I use the Compose facility of Thunderbird, then save the HTML.
But they are not tables, just text,
Sagittarius
Veteran Member
What is wrong with creating table in Word. You just click on Insert Tab and click on Table. You can insert any table you want.
A
ADMint
Guest
It's the usual nonsensical guesswork.
Word does an excellent job of creating tables. As well as importing spreadsheets. Of course if you don't know how to do it, than ....wah, this sucks.
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Look kid, there’s the beginning and the end; all that stuff in the middle is positioning for where you finish.
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Michael Fritzen
Veteran Member
Hi,
well, and I had already some serious doubts whether I may be too dumb to work with those more recent SW.
Everytime my wife asks me for some help, usually formatting, I'm starting to struggle. In some situations I've also saved the files in the older version's format and in few minutes only the job is done.
In German there's a crazy word for this: "Verschlimmbessern" which describes exactly what is happening: In the attempt of improving things actually making them worse than before.
In team sports there's a saying that one shouldn't mess around in a team that is winning the game....
All the messing around in well established and well working software is beyond me. MS is not alone here.
well, and I had already some serious doubts whether I may be too dumb to work with those more recent SW.
Everytime my wife asks me for some help, usually formatting, I'm starting to struggle. In some situations I've also saved the files in the older version's format and in few minutes only the job is done.
In German there's a crazy word for this: "Verschlimmbessern" which describes exactly what is happening: In the attempt of improving things actually making them worse than before.
In team sports there's a saying that one shouldn't mess around in a team that is winning the game....
All the messing around in well established and well working software is beyond me. MS is not alone here.
Michael Fritzen
Veteran Member
I hear you and I get your point.
However I'm wondering why SW development doesn't follow more intuitive approaches, for example thinking about swimming or cycling. I'm aware that this goes a bit too far but my point is to point out that there's hardly a reason to "re-invent the wheel" every some-years.
Who uses an application for some fundamental tasks had pretty similar tasks 10 years ago and pretty likely still will in 10 years in the future. Yeah, functionality was extended largely - but who, besides some specialists, will really make use of those? Why aren't they added by new tabs or even by user selecteable workspace layouts? If a totally new functionality is offered "under the hood" why can't a "classic interface" be offered to long time users?
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ADMint
Guest
I might see your argument if the software in question one cycle was away. But what's being missed, or intentionally ignored, is there were several cycles between what the OP was using to what the OP attempted to use now. That plays a HUGE factor in the number of changes. I honestly don't see why no one is paying attention to that fact.
Right. And you can still use the program for basic functionality. You're not required to use all the bells & whistles.
And that's the fallacy here... no one is required to use or know all the bells and whistles to get the basics.
I've been basically using Photoshop since Photoshop 7 (started with 5) and to this day I still don't use half the program's capabilities because most of it doesn't apply to my photography needs; but I at least know the basics to continue to use the program to get my photo needs done. I also understand I don't know everything about the program and thus have books and magazine around.... Just as I do for Office.
Microsoft could have done a hundred different things and some would still complain, so... And believe it or not I've seen people complain about the simplicity of a program; that some wanted more sophisticated features, so it goes both ways.
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ADMint
Guest
I could, and would argue "previous versions of Word" worked just fine with tables. And I don't say this without merit as one of my jobs in the Air Force (26 years) was Resource Manager (basically budgeting) and I had to do all types of documents and briefings which included creating Word docs with tables, charts, and spreadsheets. Also did plenty of Excel docs, as well as PowerPoint, even a bit of Access. And Outlook was a must.
Oh, and I retired from the Air Force in 2005.... way before Office 2016
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Look kid, there’s the beginning and the end; all that stuff in the middle is positioning for where you finish.
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Sagittarius
Veteran Member
Not sure what problem you had. I can specify row height or column width, and I can copy and paste entire row or I can copy and paste content of a single cell. 2010 and 2013.
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ADMint
Guest
I question that statement as well. CA has many posts of the worse of something happening with a program he doesn't like or approve of. Some have been debunked.
Maybe it's a template problem? Probably it is.
Anyway, Adobe Framemaker is far superior for table formatting. I really did not use Word for many things in a business context, because my companies paid for FrameMaker. Except in the late 1990s, I was given a corporate Word doc that crashed the PC when spell check reached around 80 pages. This was fixed after 2000 I believe.
Well into the 21st century, Word generated the world's worst HTML. Hopefully nobody does that anymore so I'm not sure it's still a problem in 2016.
Templates were really ugly until the mid or late 2000s. As I said before (and you didn't quibble with that remark) Word has improved over the years, except for a few things such as the ribbon.
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Robert Zanatta
Senior Member
Yeah, the usability could be improved.
Jim B (MSP)
Forum Pro
MS is fighting 2 issues.
1. "improvement" so they can sell something new
2. Adding new features or modifying the UI to respond to many users who want change in the current product.
The result - often confusion to happy users.
Mystery member
Forum Pro
Your narrative is quite clear.
I expressed a couple of frustrations with the Word 2016 interface, but that doesn't mean that I was locked in that frame of mind. I "moved on" by using the more efficient tools of Word 2002 and then reverted to 2016 for the rest of the operation. The next phase was constructing an index, and Word 2016 turned out to be more convenient for that.
BTW, I have been impressed by the underlying solidarity of Word 2016, also the OCR feature is handy, as well as the ability to Save As... *.pdf.
My point is that it's an excellent and fully-featured program that's less convenient to use than it should be because of the clumsy interface. I am not alone in having that opinion, and the same has been said of Win8.
Pax indeed.
I would never write a book in Word. I written my share of stuff (3 theses, tons of papers, several handbooks, articles...). I wrote some in Word, mostly because it was the tool I got at work. Luckily, now I can choose what tools I use at work.
So, I am a very experienced Word user, I even can write VBA scripts, used those for some formatting automation....And IMHO: Word is the WORST.
I prefer to use:
- text editors (Atom, Sublime Text) for first drafts. I use Markdown for initial formatting. But I stick to text files, so I can use the content in any application. It's about typing, so no need for 99% of Word's features when creating content
- LaTeX: I use it as much as possible. The learning curve seems steep for novices, but once you start using it, you don't want to look back.
- Scrivener: for the big projects. Research, notes, text, everything in there.
- Papers/JabRef: for citations
- other tools.
I really don't know, why everybody wants to write in Word.....or my favorite enemy: PowerPoint. Even worse. Excel is OK.
Why would you use Atom editor versus Sublime Text? Both are available for Linux so I am interested in trying them.
One thing I don't like about Markdown is that Bold requires two asterisks or underscores. They should have used one or the other for bold and italic. Markdown is usable with a top layer of selection-apply, but boldface looks rather awful as plain text. Otherwise Markdown is much more readable than HTML.
Yup. As I said above.
Thanks again for the recommendation. So far the best big-book software I've used is Adobe FrameMaker, but Scrivener costs less and runs on OS X, which FrameMaker does not.
Amazon allows you to write in almost anything and pour it into Kindle, however Kindle does not handle graphics very well, or at all.
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Because I just can't settle on one of them. Tried many text editors (BBEdit, TextWrangler, (x)Emacs, ...) and these two are the ones left. Both are completely configurable and have tons of extensions via packages. I could stick with any of them, but then I see minor differences and I can't decide...
And since I configured them to look very similar, I can switch between them easily. But I could stick with each of them as my sole text editor and be happy.
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