With the move to Office 2007, I am relearning a lot of the UI – where things are etc. which is a real pain – not that I’m against change, just that it’s lowering my productivity whilst I push all the Office 2007 into my head and let the Office 2003 stuff fall out…
After using a suite of application that have not really changed the layout / structure of how to enable / start / engage specific features for 11 years (at least – going back to Off 95), you get really used to where things are….
Today I found myself wanting to ‘Apply Conditional Formatting’ to some cells in Excel. My immediate action (drilled into me from 11 years of using the Office suite) was to go to the ‘Format’ menu – ah no menu’s in Office 2007…
Lets look at the ribbon bar – not on the ‘Home’ tab – browse through the others – nope still cannot find it (and browsing through the ribbon bar icons/button is not an easy process – you really have to LOOK and digest what you are seeing).
Was there a shortcut key for it in Office 2003 – can’t remember (since verified there is not), so at this point I started on the route of ‘ok lets add it as a button to the ‘Quick Access’ bar’ – but, come on, that’s not good….
I’m a great advocate of many of the things Joel says in terms of ‘software usability and discoverability’ (covered well in his book ‘User Interface Design of Programmers’ ) and am feeling the pain of ‘Learned Helplessness’ – here is Joel’s great post on this whole area.
I was thinking about the impact of such a radical change on a smaller organization (like the place I work – C2C). I have gone to great lengths to get the development team to read the aforementioned book and understand that our software must be easy to use and discoverable (because no one reads manuals). If we made such a radical change then the support guys would be swamped – it would be unmanageable. Doesn’t happen that way with Microsoft, the average Joe doesn’t have a support contract for Office….
I guess it’s time I did some research and found if others are having this pain, what the options are and maybe even read the manual (buy a book).