Hire 100 common people to review a major change like the ribbon

[GomerFackworth (is this unusual enough?)]

When you make a major change like the ribbon, why don't you hire 100 or more
normal people who use Word (whatever) regularly and DON'T WORK FOR YOU, and
FILM THEM to see how angry and frustrated they get. Why should we common
people have to waste so many hours in frustration, trying to understand a
program like Word 2007 when the Help doesn't even answer a question in a
relevant way?

Example of a hair puller: In an outline, Word inserts a page break in a
random manner. Sometimes a page has only one line, sometimes a few. In
draft mode with the format showing, there is a single untitled dotted line
that can't be deleted. There are no extra paragraph marks at the end of the
document. The whole document only shows one section. Why?

Help is totally useless with this issue because it only shows how to deal
with "normal" breaks that you can insert or delete. So far no one I have
talked to can find out why those lines are there. I even opened the file in
Word 2000 and they are still there and can't be deleted.

You have heard it a million times before. Word Perfect's Reveal Codes tells
you something, in this case, that there is a HRt-SPg imbedded in the
formatting as the heading style changes from Heading 5 to Heading 4.

Checking the setup of Heading 5 in Word 2007: Modify
Style>Format>Paragraph>Line and Page Breaks, I find that only Window/Orphan
control is checked. What does Window/Orphan control do? I click on the ? on
top of the box and Word Help opens, but nothing of relevance is showing, so I
type in Search "window/orphan control" and the same ambiguous "Results of top
100" comes up, such as "Work with the Help Window"; "Finding the content you
need in the Help window"; "Enable or disable ActiveX controls in Office
documents", "Why am I getting a message that says to troubleshoot my Internet
connection?", etc.

MY GOD, do you people live in an alternative universe? You say this is all
supposed to be intuitive? Intuition works on the principle of Lateral
Thinking, which means that there has to be something that links blueberries
with Grandma, i.e. PIE. Where is the link between "window/orphan control"
and
"Why am I getting a message that says to troubleshoot my Internet connection?"

Are you all cognizant of the fact that dealing with these problems costs the
world millions of hours of lost productivity? Why? What arrogant right do
you at Microsoft believe that you possess to foist this on us? If any of you
believe in Heaven and Hell, you had best start praying that you don't go to
Hell and spend the rest of eternity having to use Word 2007's Help.


----------------
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http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...8510063c7&dg=microsoft.public.word.pagelayout

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

What you are experiencing with outlines has nothing to do with the Ribbon;
it would be true in any version of Word. If you are using Word's built-in
heading styles, then you are seeing the effect of "Keep with next"
formatting, which is part of the style definition for all these styles. If
you will not have any body text in your outline, then you need to remove the
KWN property from heading styles below, say, Heading 2.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

"GomerFackworth (is this unusual enough?)"

 

[GomerFackworth (is this unusual enough?)]

Thank you Suzanne, once again. I did finally figure out the KWN issue after
some hours of searching, however I think you are missing the point of my
suggestion to Microsoft. The outline question is only one of many that
wastes my precious time that I have left on this planet.

First, this is posted as a Suggestion which I thought would go to MS not to
the forum.

My point is that they foist on the public a program that is absolutely
frustrating to use, and wastes millions of hours that could be spent
productively. So much for computers making life simple.

Why is Help so Unintuitive? What happened to the way it used to work? Even
in the days of Clipit, search came up with credible possibilities, not some
absurdities that have no relevance to the search keyword.

Why do popup boxes a) open up Help instead of just giving a definition as
they used to, and b) use terms that Help doesn't recognize?

Why do these forums have to be filled wilth hundreds of good people like you
working for free to repair the lost hair of millions of frustrated folks when
MS makes millions foisting a travesty of word processing on us because they
are the big gorilla?

Every time that MS comes out with a new product, one hopes that it is an
IMPROVEMENT on the old version. Instead, one is forced back into
kindergarten having to start over with new terminology and learn new ways of
dealing with the same issues?

This would not be a problem if we could still use the old versions that we
have grown to know and use efficiently, but MS then creates a new OS and the
old versions of programs don't work anymore. I have been working with
computers since they had tubes in them so I do have some sense about this
issue. I have a closet full of old programs that don't work anymore, even if
MS insists that they have "compatability modes". And I have some that I
still have to have 3 computers with different OSs on so I can work around
those issues. Of course, if I were rich, I could afford to upgrade all of
these programs to new versions each and every time MS changed.

What is it in the MS culture that makes them so user unfriendly? That was
my point.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

FWIW, MS does have "usability labs" in which testers use early versions of
the program, under observation. I have no idea how these users are selected,
but the story we were given was that beginning Word users generally found
the Ribbon easier to use, moderately experienced users found it no worse
than the menus, and only "power users" would be frustrated. It seems that
user reaction across the board has somewhat tempered this optimism. In
particular, MS underestimated the extent to which users want to customize
the UI (their CEIP results told them that users rarely change anything, and
they already knew that users *hated* adaptive menus), and Word 2010 will
allow for additional customization, though I'm disappointed that it will
still not allow users to design or use custom button faces even for the QAT
buttons (for which dynamic resizing is not an issue).

I don't think anyone would argue that Help hasn't gotten worse with every
subsequent version. Much of that is a result of the struggle to keep up with
new features, especially for RTM. This was especially critical in 2007, in
which everything was in a different place, so existing Help was largely
obsolete. But a great leap forward with Word 2007 is that Help can be
updated along with other features by periodic patches and service releases.
And the online assistance can be very helpful if you have time to watch a
demo video; my gripe is that the simple "About x" is always way down the
results list, far below the online help video.

Context-sensitive Help is another loss that we can lament till we're blue in
the face but should not expect to see restored, apparently. It is still
available for some features, however, and the more informative ScreenTips
for buttons are a step in the right direction as well.

The stated purpose of the Ribbon was to make features more "discoverable."
At the same time, many of them were reconfigured to make them easier for
"ordinary users" to take advantage of. Unfortunately, this results in cover
pages and TOCs that users can't figure out how to remove or edit, loss of
AutoComplete for vast libraries of AutoText entries (restored in 2010, thank
goodness), etc. Not to mention that, short of adding a button to the QAT,
many features are one or two more mouse clicks away than in previous
versions.

All of this is really an attempt to be user-friendly (these NGs are another
such gesture), but 2007 proves once again that no application can be all
things to all users.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

"GomerFackworth (is this unusual enough?)"

 

[JohnTheTemp]

I share your frustration and every long-time user that I discussed the issue
with do too.

While, I agree with Suzanne that MS was interested in making things more
"discoverable", they should first have realized that things were already
reasonably discoverable. The original designers weren't oblivious to that
principle. Any new design would only be a fractional improvement.

But I think there was another -- secretive -- motive for the ribbon: Office
needed a radical overhaul -- driven by the old principle of "planned
obsolescence".