MS Office 2007 annoys post-grad students

Going by my dealings with students, Microsoft Office 2007 is really annoying.

For those unaware, Office 2007 looks completely unlike any previous release of Office. It has a strange, magic, ribbon that takes the place of the menu and toolbars. The ribbon dynamically changes based on what Office sees you doing. Editing a picture? Here’s the picture controls. Working in a table? Here’s the table controls.

Apparently this is easier to use than previous versions of Office. Don Dodge, who works for Microsoft, says:

It will take a little time for experienced users to get used to the new Ribbon, but it really is much more intuitive and easy to use.

Intuitive and easy to use? How are they different? Anyway…

The problems that students have been having with Office 2007 are to do with using and modifying Styles in Word 2007. Word 2007 comes with a list of “quick styles” that you can apply to your document, changing fonts, layout, etc in one fell swoop. However, when it comes to controlling the finer details of how a document is presented, Word 2007 is dismally unintuitive and hard to use. The problem partly comes from Word 2007 being otherwise “intuitive and easy to use”. By making simple things easy, complex things have been hidden away.

One of our requirements for post-grad student theses, from Honours to PhD level, is that chapter 1 starts on page 1 and all preceding pages are numbered in lower case romans. This is fairly sophisticated stuff in any version of Word, requiring section breaks to establish the areas where the roman and arabic numbers will go and then separating those sections and changing the page numbering style in each section. In Word 2007, establishing a section break is fairly easy, it’s right there on the Ribbon. Separating concurrent breaks and the other required steps to get the chapter-1-on-page-1 formatting is not so simple.

Yes, this is yet another example of the 80/20 rule, where the funtionality post-grad students require is in the 80% of functionality that is possible but hidden to allow the “most popular” 20% to be visible on the Ribbon.

The thing is, Word is a pretty sophisticated piece of software. If Microsoft’s extensive user research shows that most people are only using the functionality available on the ribbon, then those people are basically using a $600 version of AbiWord (which is free).

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Published:
September 27, 2007 / 12:24 pm
Category:
design, microsoft, productivity, simplicity, software, technology
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