Hi Larry,
Yep, that's pretty much the logic. Satisfy the 90% "average
users"--because, that's where the money is. "Majority rule" and "market
for the middle" by the way, is not peculiar to MS. I'm not screaming
about MS because I see this as just one outgrowth of larger cultural
forces that bring people to insist computers do everything for them--and
because I haven't tried Word 2007 yet and don't know how many of these
changes are going to be in my forthcoming MacWord 2008, so I'm not
feeling any pain at present.
However, on the grand scale of things, it is not total disaster. Someone
already has a program you can use to customize the Ribbon.
http://pschmid.net/office2007/ribbon...izer/index.php
MS still believes in customizability, and it's still there, it's just
been shifted from the regular user to the expert.
As a side effect, this makes it much more difficult to start out as an
average user and become a "skilled and creative or just idiosyncratic
user of Word"--or, rather MS is trying to make "skilled Word user" mean
something else. I do think that in 5 years or so, we might be in a
better situation overall than we are now--many more regular people in
offices who are good at making Word behave for their everyday tasks,
with plenty of third-party programs or add-ins for those who want to go
beyond. And this should be more efficient overall, if people can
download a program to customize Word rather than having each individual
have to learn the skills.
Daiya
Mac/Word MVP
PS. They do want to get rid of VBA--it's gone in MacOffice, and they
tried to remove it in Windows Office, but delayed eliminating it because
of a huge uproar, as many large companies have invested thousands in
VBA-based custom solutions, with thousands of people who use macros
daily even though they don't create/record macros themselves. But it
will be gone eventually--I think they promised 10 years in 2005 or
somesuch. However, as I understand it, this is more for security
reasons, though it follows the same pattern of shifting customization
from the average user to the expert.
Larry wrote:
Beth,
You've opened my eyes. Now I understand the logic behind Microsoft's
destruction of Word. By the same logic by which the menus were eliminated,
since the "majority" of users don't create custom toolbars and custom menus,
MS just did away with them as well. Or at least made it much harder to
create and install them--I haven't figured this all out yet. In any case,
the former beautiful feature by which you opened the Customize dialog box
and could effortllessly create a new toolbar and give it a name put on it
what you wanted seems to be gone.
Hey, folks, the "majority" of users also never create a macro, never edit a
macro, and never assign a custom keystroke to a macro or to a built-in
command. So, by MS's logic of only keeping features that "most" users use,
how come MS didn't eliminate VBA, eliminate macro recording, eliminate
macros, eliminate the Macro dialog box, eliminate the VBA editing interface,
and eliminate the Customize Keyboard dialog box???
The great thing about Word was that it had thousands of capabilities, and
each user, depending on his interests, might only deal with a small part of
them. So each person could in effect have his own "Word." But now we've
moved away from such diversity toward a single uniformity. A single
"majority rule" determines what will be in Word. Only what the 90 percent
of users who are mediocre users will determine what is in Word. Everything
that a more skilled and creative or just idiosyncratic user of Word might
want to access is to be eliminated. That appears to be the logic.
The only thing that saves the situation from total disaster is that MS has
not yet been completely consistent in its program of destruction, so it has
still left some "non-popular" features in place.
Larry