The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #114940 Message #2459320
Posted By: JohnInKansas
07-Oct-08 - 11:20 AM
Thread Name: Tech: Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User
Subject: RE: Tech: Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User
Unfortunately, Microsoft has decided that most of these tools are unsafe for you to use, and has DELETED THEM beginning with Office 2007. Most of the quick keys still work, but you cannot access the menus they come from.
In EVERY Microsoft program, prior to Office 2007, you had five main menus: File - Edit - View - Tools - Tools - Help. It was quite easy to learn where to find what you needed to do what you wanted to do.
In Office 2007 (and generally in Vista) the "File" menu is partially found at the COW SPLAT in the top left corner of the view. It contains five sub-menu icons that perform some of the functions you might be accustomed to, but all the names have been changed, and instead of a one-word "command" you have to read a five line paragraph that "explains" that you CAN'T DO WHAT YOU THINK YOU WANT TO DO but you can do something that MIGHT vaguely resemble it.
The main menu bar in Word has nine "tabs" to give you other options:
Home - Insert - Page Layout - References - Mailings - Review - View - Add Ins. The ONLY change you are allowed to make to this setup is to add another tab called "Developer."
Each of the tabs has a sub-menu bar with 50 to 90 indistinguishable icons. Clicking any icon will, as with the COW SPLAT, give you several multi-line paragraphs explaining that you can't do what you are accustomed to do, but that you might be allowed to do something vaguely similar.
If you use one of the shortcuts from an earlier version, using the table menu as an example:
In earlier versions Alt-A opened the table menu so you could choose your next step. In Office 2007 Word, Alt-A shows you a tiny box containing "Alt-A," and the message, "Complete typing the Word 2003 command, or press escape to go back and use the cowsplat and the fuzzy icons to do it like we want you to."
IF YOU REMEMBER that Alt-A,V used to get you the table|convert menu you may still add the V - at which time the little box shows "Alt-A, V" and the same message: "Complete typing the Word 2003 command, or press escape to go back and use the cowsplat and the fuzzy icons to do it like we want you to."
IF YOU REMEMBER that Alt-A, V, X converts text to a table, and Alt-A, V, B converts a table to text, the command sequence still works. In order to find all of the simple functions previously contained in the "Table" menu, you must access THREE SEPARATE TABS on the main menu bar, and on each of them, you have to "drill down" past the 50 odd "choices" (almost all useless) to "additional options" - at which point SOME PART of the menu from earlier versions may actually appear.
Since all the bits and pieces of the previously orderly menus do appear somewhere, it's quite obvious that it would have been very simple for the program to show you the appropriate bit when you enter the beginning of a shortcut sequence, but MICROSOFT BELIEVES THAT YOU ARE AN IDIOT and you should not be permitted to decide what YOU WANT TO DO. You should just click on the fuzzy icons until something happens that you can live with.
According to both personal friends at Microsoft and Industry News Reporters speaking publicly, NO PERSON who was a senior manager for Microsoft and who worked on Vista or on Office 2007 is now a manager at Microsoft, but they try to tell us "it's wonderful?"
John