The Microsoft Office Word Team's Blog

What brings out the chatty me on a web site?

When I find that just as I have something I want to say, I am immediately presented with an easy opportunity to do so. When a "comments" text book is no more than a mouse click away; like on this blog. When I can say what I want to say right away, before I have gone bored or started to think about something else. I have the attention span of a gold fish; there's a 10 second window of opportunity in which I must have already begun to type, otherwise I'm already off to do something else! :)

But if such an opportunity is presented, I can easily spend half an hour on a reply to a review, answer someone's question, or generally speak what's on my mind; it's the opportunity to start that decides if I'll do so.

I hate being presented with too specific questions to answer! I don't like when being asked "was this solution helpful?", clicking "no" and then being asked "what were you trying to do?". Why does that matter? There was a specific reason why the solution was unhelpful, but that reason is not related to what I was trying to do. So despite the large, empty, inviting text box appearing right beneath my mouse pointer I probably won't answer the question...

FWIW!

I agree with Ilya.  For a while I was participating on the OpenXML Developer Forum until my more technical questions were not being answered.  I see many examples of "how do I make text bold" getting answered (or sample how-to's of the same being posted), but not something hard like "what is the formula to calculate tint in DrawingML (the documentation is wrong!!!)".  So I just gave up posting anything at all.  Ignoring questions is a great way to get people to stop posting!  And I have yet to find a place where I can post that question.  The PPTX/DrawingML blog team won't respond to me either, not even to say, "sorry, we don't answer those kinds of questions".

Other things that might make me chatty is when a topic hits on something that is important to me, such as this one.  Something for which I have a strong opinion or complaint.  And it may not be the original question that will get me to answer, after all I wasn't planning on posting anything till I saw Ilya's post.  So it's the whole evolution of the thread.

Not having to log into a site makes a big difference too.  I'm too lazy to remember passwords, and go through the whole login process just to post some comments.  I guess I'm also part goldfish.  If it requires too much attention just to get to the comment I wanted to make, I'll swim off to something else :)

Office 2007 again forces radical changes from the previous major release.  How much time and money is spent for people to relearn the basic command locations for the products.  What is the drive to make such changes?  If older versions were not obsoleted, maybe not such a bad idea.  Does the design team look at the Office product and say, "OK, what can we change in the next release".  That the heck drives the changes?  Big pain in the @#$%^ to retrain everyone.  Help files are of little use.  Example:  searching for toolbars in Word 2007 provides no obvious link.  Toolbars, for some, was an often used item, now it is hidden until the new structure is learned.  Big pain in the @#$%.

Word 2007 may be a work of art in the eyes of the developers, but the computer power required to run it and the revamped layout and altered structure does not help the user.

When I am in Word 2007 I can not select options under Word Options.

They all seem to be unclickable. I can select them under Excel and

Power Point but not word. In order to open a document that was in 2003

format I have to open Word, click on the Windows logo, select Open,

and find the file. If I double click on it Word opens and there is

nothing there but a blank page. Any ideas?