Sunday, June 10, 2007

Dear Microsoft...

Okay, you've heard ot NaNoWriMo, I assume: the goal is to spend a month writing a 40,000 word novel? Well, there was another challenge, entitled WoAdWriMo - the Worldwide Adventure Writing Month. The idea was that in the month of June one would write a 30-page adventure scenario for the RPG of your choice. The chosen month being June.

Why not, I thought?

So, I've spent the last few days working out details of plot, locations, and so forth, batting ideas back and forth, and so on. Today, I finally sat down to start the actual writing, with a view to first assembling all the peripheral bits of text (descriptions of the city, new rules changes, that sort of thing), so I could get on with the adventure itself over the next three weeks.

And I ran straight into the brick wall that is the new Word for Windows.

I hate the new interface. I cannot find any of the things I wanted to do to text, nothing is where it should be, and every operation consequently took much longer than it should. And the thing is, I was an expert user of the old Word. I was able to do a huge amount with the existing functionality and menus, and I liked being able to do that. They've taken all that hard-won experience and flushed it, for a new interface that looks and feels like a computer game I don't want to play.

I'm sure they've spent a huge amount of money on developing this new interface. It was not money well spent. Avoid Word 2007 like the plague.

1 comment:

AdventuringJen said...

Absolutely!
I worked briefly for a company that had the pleasure of trialling 2007 (I think trial just meant getting it a few months early, it was already a completed product and no way it was going to change)
It is horrible isn't it? As the job I was doing was entirely based around Word and reformatting a whole pile of application forms for the company I was close to a gibbering wreck.
Yuck, yuck, yuck!