This week at work so far has been spent swearing at the computer. Not that that doesn’t happen now and again, a few times a day perhaps, most weeks, but this week it has been worse than usual. You see, our IT people decided to upgrade our Microsoft Office Suite. Yeah, we now have Office 2007. This is not a good thing. Here are some examples of why:
What’s with the colour scheme? In Word I can chose between blue background with blue type, grey background with grey type and charcoal background with – uhm – whiteish type. The charcoal is too black and dreary for me (besides, white type on black is NOT easy on the eyes in the long run). The two others are fine, I suppose, since – with glasses – my eyesight is pretty normal. I’d hate to have poor eyesight and trying to make sense of this, though.
Instead of nested windows, each document opens in it’s own window. Fine. There are advantages and drawbacks to both approaches, and this is not new in Office 2007. However, what IS new is that if you use the “close window” cross in the upper right hand corner when you have only one document open you close both the document and the programme. There is no “close open document” button handily available. Well, there is now – though at upper left rather than upper right – I had to go into settings and dig it out.
The “Print” button, the equivalent of “ctrl+p”, is not immediately available (though it is now, I dug that out, too).
They MOVED THE BLOODY SEND BUTTON in the create new message window in Outlook. Now I have to search for it every time (yeah, I know, I’ll get used to it).
If you select a piece of text and place you cursor over it, a “handy” little box pops up with likely buttons – bold, italics and so on. Which means that if you move you cursor over the selected text in order to replace the cursor and change the selection (because, say, it “helpfully” selected a word more than you wanted when all you wanted was to select a few words in a sentence and delete them) you end up clicking the bloody bold button because you click before you really think and the “handy” box takes a second to appear anyway and so is only just there in time to register the actual click but wasn’t visible when your finger started moving down on the mouse button.
In Excel you can select a column (or row), right click and choose “Insert” and it will insert a column (or row) in front (or above). You can also select a cell, right click, select “Insert…” and get a dialogue box with a few choices. However, as far as I can see you can’t make a selection and then go to a menu to choose “Insert row below”, “Insert column before” and so on. Not a big thing, I guess, but I like being able to do things the way I used to do them…
There is more. However, I suppose that’s plenty for now.
The week hasn’t been all bad, though. For example, my brother sent me a link to this Onion story, which pretty much made my week, despite Microsoft:
Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book
I rather like:
Even more bizarre, Meyer is believed to have done most of his reading during his spare time—time when the outwardly healthy and stable resident could have literally been doing anything else, be it aimlessly surfing the Internet, taking a nap, or simply just staring at his bedroom wall.
