Nick Arnett wrote: > So... I "upgraded" to Microsoft Office 2007 recently. Can't do half of what > I used to do because I can't find anything. They seem to have succeeded in > making it harder to use. > The most bizarre thing is that I cannot find the Help menu anywhere. My > wife, who was forced into this particular torture a few months ago, has had > the same problem. > > The whole point of using drop-down menus in a GUI is to be table to slide > the cursor across them and immediately see what's available. Somebody in > Redmond apparently thought they were improving on that.
It _is_ an improvement, if you give it a chance. Where over the years the Menus became nearly non-sensical containers of cruft (what was the difference between the old "Edit" menu and "Tools" or "Insert"? why did the "Table" menu show up all the time even though most of it was useless if you weren't actually working on a Table?), the Ribbon actually is broken down into mostly intelligent categories with a great deal more testing and user feedback than the old menus were ever put through. (I'm a relatively long time Office user (since Windows 3.1) and a huge fan of the new Ribbon. Admittedly I'm a young guy and I still adapt quickly to change...) All of the Ribbon buttons have huge tooltips with pictures if you can't figure out what a button does from the name, and just about everything on the Ribbon previews what it does in your document as you mouse over it. There is a bit of a "relearning" experience, but I think you'll find that the new placement of things generally makes logical sense. Here's a few navigational tricks that I find generally help when they are pointed out: * You can use your mouse's scroll wheel to switch tabs on the ribbon. This can be very handy for fast searches to find what you are looking for. * The new keyboard shortcuts are generally quite friendly. Press and release Alt and you'll see little letters pop up over the buttons. * When mousing over a button pressing F1 will jump you straight to that buttons topic in the help. Also, just another more general tip: * The PDF Exporter (Save As PDF) for Office 2007 is a free download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en (Adobe blocked it from the out of box install, which to me is a pretty petty maneuver...) Hope some of those tips help, -- --Max Battcher-- http://www.worldmaker.net/ Sometimes old dogs get good treats from new tricks Maru _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
