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baldrick's turnipsFA Cup winners Office 2007I just got my hands on Microsoft Office 2007
If you are in IT, don't go near Office 2007. I spent yesterday installing and learning the UI, just out of interest. My experience: - The user interface is barely customizable. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA102277541033.aspx?ac=1&uc=1&WT.mc_id=46#comments I teach technical writing with styles at work, and I do not want the Format commands. If I am writing short adhoc documents I will most likely use formatting and ignore the styles. I.e. I either want a Format toolbar XOR I want a Styles toolbar .. I do not need both. What does Office 2007 do? Put Format AND Styles in the same tab, and we cant change it. - I cannot find a way to start list numbering from any number other then 1. - The use of styles has changed. Office 2007 introduces a new style, Linked style. This operates just as the Paragraph style did in 2003, fine. But the Paragraph style in 2007 operates differently. Guess what the Paragraph style in 2003 is interpreted as in 2007 - yes a Paragraph style. It no longer works the same - aaahhhh!!! So now I have to convert all of my customized styles from Paragraph type to Linked type. - When trying to find a style in the Manage Styles window, I can hit an alphanumeric key and the list scrolls to the first style beginning with that letter. That is in the first tab. Click on any of the other 3 tabs in this window and this functionality no longer works. - The ribbon UI only applies to some of the Office 2007 applications. Visio and Outlook retain the 2003 menus. I have not touched Vista - but does the OS have a ribbon type UI? Are Microsoft going to apply the same ribbon type UI to ALL their applications? You can hardly get more complex than the OS, so surely all the arguments for the ribbon should apply to Vista. How many thousand of idiots at Microsoft were involved in designing the Office 2007 ribbon? I don't think the ribbon is a bad idea, but did no-one consider the implications to the IT world? From what I can find out, Microsoft dumbed down the UI to make it more intuitive for those people who could not read the manuals in 2003. They did not take into consideration those people that were reasonably comfortable with the Office 2003 UI. To summarize, Office 2007 appears to be a classic case of the the developers listening to their stakeholders and believing everything they were told without asking any questions. How many systems analysts work on the Office product? Les. Early Signs Of AlzheimersI blame it on the weekend: Update: At least I provided entertainment to the Seattle community http://www.bobrivers.com/ontheshow/ Scroll down to Thursday and click the appropriate link. IBM Lotus Notes
My current job is the 3rd position I have taken with a company that has inflicted Lotus Notes on its employees. There is a great web site http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/ that elaborates on many of the frustrating quirks of this fine application. I have tried to post some of my own favourite application anti-features to the site, but without success (I'm guessing that the site is full). Here I list my 9 favourite stupid annoyances that come with Lotus Notes v6.5: 9. 'You cannot drag and drop out of trash with soft deletes enabled, use restore instead' - It knows that I want to restore an email from the trash folder to the inbox folder, but for some reason insists that you use the restore command. 8. 'You are not authorized to perform that operation' - This message is displayed when you try to send an email to a list of invitees on a meeting which you did not schedule. You can see the invited people, and Notes even displays a menu command, 'Send memo to all invitees'. If you select this command while focused on someone else's meeting this is the message you will get - duh! 7. Refresh your inbox. It knows that you have new email, because it displays a refresh tag on your inbox, but you have to click on the tag to retrieve your email. If it knows I have email, just go get it, why are you asking me to get it? 6. Create a new email from a Windows application while Notes is displaying the Trash folder. When you display an email in any folder other than Trash you will get the expected 'Reply', 'Reply To All', 'Forward', etc commands. If the email is in the Trash folder all you get are 'Restore' and 'Delete' commands. If you create a new email from outside Notes while Notes is displaying the Trash folder, guess what, you get the Trash folder commands displayed on the new email. You have to 'Restore' your new email before you are able to send it. 5. 'The document could not be deleted because you currently have the same document open in the preview pane. This document will now be closed so that it may deleted from the current view' - oh, give me a break. You know I want to delete it, so just delete it, but no .. Notes will display it in a view where you may press the delete button again and this time it will delete it. 4,3,2,1. This annoyance gets the top 4 spots because it proved to be a total embarrassment to me at work this week. There are at least 4 annoyances with the repeating functionality associated with scheduling a meeting. Firstly, once you schedule a repeating meeting and send out the invite there is no way to change the repeats. You have to cancel the meeting and reschedule. Also when you cancel, Notes will automatically send an email to all invitees informing them that you have canceled the meeting. Earlier this week I attempted to schedule a repeating meeting every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the next couple of months. I copied an existing meeting whose invites included some high level managers. After several failed attempts to schedule a repeating meeting, I finally gave up and sent a meeting notice for each day. The result being many many meeting notices and canceled meeting notice being delivered to the inboxes of my management and several colleagues. The result being that I looked like a total idiot who could not schedule a meeting with Lotus Notes. Addendum: One I forgot, I guess because it happens so frequently it almost appears to be normal behaviour - if you have any text selected in a message and you hit 'Delete', nothing happens. Deselect the text and the 'Delete' button now works - duh! If you are ever offered the opportunity to work with this unique IBM application be prepared for a whole new software experience. Alternatively just run away, it's better for your health in the long run. If you are interested in reading more, visit the Lotus Notes Sucks website to see many unique features offered by this application. Les. Addendum: I will be adding new experiences as they occur. Northwest Driving ExperienceQuestion: Are there drivers anywhere in the world, who are more ignorant than those in Washington state?
Most drivers throughout the world need to concentrate on 1) brakes, 2) steering wheel, 3) clutch and gears, 4) indicators and 5) accelerator, in that order. in addition they may be operating windscreen wipers, radio/cd player, windows, lights, seat adjustment, seat belt. Drivers in the Washington state have the following list of things to concentrate on in this order; 1) cellphone, 2) coffee, 3) McDonald's, 4) makeup/nose hair 5) windscreen wipers, 6) the above, less the clutch (no-one drives a manual here). This is a list of some of the worst driving habits that you will experience in this state:
To this end I recommend the Washington state driving test is amended to add the follow manouevres:
Where else in the world do you see driving instructions on the side of the road. All along the freeways, you will see signs that state 'Keep Right Except To Pass'. Does anyone in Washington state read these signs, or is it that the instructions are just too complicated to follow?
More to follow ..
Lossless bollocksI'm a music collector .. accumulated hundreds of live bootlegs, mostly from other users who are serious collectors. What you notice when trading with these people is that you often hear the term 'lossless' audio, which basically means non-mp3 audio. MP3 audio is called 'lossy' because during compression of the original audio, sounds beyond normal human hearing are removed from the sound (it is possible of course to create even smaller mp3 files which remove frequencies within human hearing ranges). Basically anything of quality higher than 128/44 should not be of any less discernable quality to the average human ear.
With that said, tell me why many people who trade bootlegs (yes those recordings that are of inferior quality to most music that you can purcahse legally) insist on not trading for mp3s. In fact many times you will see a warning arrive with the bootleg saying 'Do NOT convert to mp3 ..'. Why? These recordings are often made on a cassette recorder, for heaven's sake. A recording device that cannot create anywhere near the quality of a typical mp3. A recording device which introduces artificial hiss onto the sound which mp3 converters can remove - Duh!
It's such a waste having to download or trade files that are up to 10 times the size they become after I have converted them to mp3.
Les. |
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