David Pogue of the New York Times has a very good article on Office 2007. He’s impressed with the same things I am, though he’s more forgiving of the quirks. I’m grateful to him for one important thing: He told me where the “Print” menu is hidden. There’s a Windows logo in the upper left-hand portion of the screen. Press it, and a “File” menu appears. Glory be.

Having pressed the magic button, it’s very nice, but I still fault Microsoft for not having something obvious to tell you, at least once, that the menu is there. I’m growing more comfortable with Office 2007, and I’m even willing to say that it’s an improvement over Office 2003. There are a number of decisions that the designers made–and force users to live with–that I suspect will become options in future versions. An example, you say? Try this: I don’t do mail-merge documents. I haven’t used the mail merge features of any word processor in, oh, 15 years. The mail-merge tab is one of the seven permanent features of Word, so it will be up there taking up space from now on. If I could replace it with another, more frequently-used group of functions, I wouldn’t complain. But I can’t. So I will. 

Categories: General computing
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