[CMoya]

MDI Confusion

I guess this is more of a rant, but I'm hoping there's something like a reg
fix option or something:

I'm familiar with MDI and how it works. But Office 2007's (and prior)
implementation is completely incomprehensible and confusing. When you open
multiple Excel documents they all open in the "same window," but the taskbar
leads you to believe that they are individual windows. They don't show up in
Vista FLIP. What?! You can't put them on different monitors. Resizing and
moving them is a non-intuitive mess.... mainly because of the great pains
the app goes to hide its MDI-ness.

PowerPoint behaves the same way... but even worse, it doesn't have the 2nd
tier Min/Max buttons (that all MDI apps have) so you can't move around
individual documents (well, you can, it's just not intuitive). Prior to 2007
even the Close X button behaved differently between PowerPoint and Excel.

Word works perfectly. Beautifully.

Comically, Access 2007 gets MDI right. It uses a Tabbed interface to show
multiple windows instead of MDI and SDI. Beautiful! Kudos to the Ac2007
team.

What's with this ugly and confusing inconsistency between all these apps?
Either go full SDI (like Word), real MDI (ugly but at least consistent), or
do what Access 07 does. Will it ever be fixed? My poor users. We're
currently evaluating upgrading all our machines to Office 2007 and we're
taking the opportunity to look at other suites (like OpenOffice). Office
2007 though it has some nice features, just falls way short in the
user-friendliness and polished department. I had hoped it addressed these
longstanding head-scratchers.

--
-C. Moya
http://www.cmoya.com

[Peter A]

In article ,
says...
MDI Confusion

I guess this is more of a rant, but I'm hoping there's something like a reg
fix option or something:

I'm familiar with MDI and how it works. But Office 2007's (and prior)
implementation is completely incomprehensible and confusing. When you open
multiple Excel documents they all open in the "same window," but the taskbar
leads you to believe that they are individual windows. They don't show up in
Vista FLIP. What?! You can't put them on different monitors. Resizing and
moving them is a non-intuitive mess.... mainly because of the great pains
the app goes to hide its MDI-ness.


You can put them on separate monitors by restoring the main program
window (that is, not maximized) then dragging it to fill the extended
desktop on the 2 monitors. THen you can size and position the individual
document windows as needed.

--
Peter Aitken
Author, MS Word for Medical and Technical Writers
www.tech-word.com