Friday 2nd December 2005
Redarded Office UI
It always amazes me when people complain about flaws in the open source desktop world’s UI, since Microsoft UI can be stunningly retarded. My pet peeve is Office.
Not all of Office though, just one thing. And it annoys me weekly. And it’s really quite retarded.
I open up two Word documents. There are two taskbar buttons. I click them to change between them. When I’m done with one of the Word documents, I click the X in the top right corner. One closes. That’s fine.
I open up two Visio diagrams. There is only one taskbar button. I use the “Window” menu to change between them. When I’m done with one of the Visio diagrams, I click the X in the not-quite top right corner. One closes. I don’t like it, but it’s reasonable.
I open up two spreadsheets. There are two taskbar buttons. I click them to change between them. When I’m done with one of the spreadsheets, I click the X in the top right corner. Both close. That’s retarded.
The main problem is the inconsitency. I don’t know the UI terms exactly (anyone help me here?), but Word gives you one ‘application’ per document. Visio uses a multi-document interface (one application for mulitple documents). And Excel pretends to give you more than one application, but doesn’t really. This catches me out every week.
So with the newest, bestest, shinyistest version of the bestest office application out there, and they can’t decide which fundamental document handling model to use for the different components. Remind me why it’s so good?
MS Office used to be consistent, MDI, (i.e. the way Visio works) until Office 2000. At that point they decided to make Word SDI because too many novice users were unable to understand MDI (or rather the Windows interface makes MDI un-intuitive. This would have been ‘okay’ (given that the Windows interface guidelines suggest applications can be SDI or MDI) except for the fact that the messed around with Excel.
A better solution would have been for Microsoft to revise the Windows interface guidelines so that all apps should be MDI - and adjust the interface accordingly to make it intuitive. I’ve not seen Vista but hopefully it will improve on this.
But whilst we’re talking about bad interface design, I don’t like this text box (or how it appears in Safari). The CSS menu to the right overlaps this text box and there is no horiz scroll so I had to widen my window to type this in…
Comment by Mustafa Arif — 2/12/2005 @ 5:43 pm
Thanks for making that clear, I thought I was the one accidentally closing both Excel workbooks at once when I have done it. I would never have believed that would be Excel’s behaviour with SDI!
Comment by Sam Richards — 3/12/2005 @ 7:02 am
Thanks for the background Mustafa. I skipped from Office 97 to Office 2003 - I gave up on Microsoft years ago, but now that I’m working in a Microsoft-dominated environment I have to put up with it again.
As for the CSS, I hadn’t noticed that before (and it’s not Safari-specific). I’ll try to sort that out. Mental note: I really do need to upgrade my Wordpress install…
Comment by Andy — 3/12/2005 @ 12:38 pm
I don’t understand Office 2003. Try Office 2004 on a Mac. The interface is reasonably good - and consistently MDI.
Comment by Mustafa Arif — 5/12/2005 @ 12:45 am
What’s wrong with using the ‘nearly in the top right hand corner’ x? That only closes one excel document? Or is it the combination of 2 taskbar buttons with the ‘not quite top right hand’ corner button? Excel is the only MS product I use regularly so I guess I find it ‘normal’ for that reason.
Oh yeah, and I’m having similar textbox issues to MA, only my window is on full screen already so I am typing blind for half of it. I make no apoligies for typos!
Comment by Nia — 7/12/2005 @ 8:47 pm
Nia: It’s the combination thing that’s the problem. Two taskbar buttons suggests two separate windows - i.e. you should be able to close one window using the X on the window bar, without it closing the other.
What browser are you using Nia? I’ve pushed the new blog layout without much testing, since I really wanted to upgrade Wordpress when I had the chance…
Comment by Andy — 8/12/2005 @ 12:19 am
And there is what some alternative?
Comment by Kim — 6/11/2008 @ 3:03 am