To be amazed how hard it is to use Microsoft Word now?

[1jan2020]

I'm not talking about using it to write stuff. But when it comes to saving the document, it's an absolute nightmare! That big black screen, with so many different options for what to do (and none of them very helpful). It's really not obvious how to simply save something to the desktop. It honestly looks like something from the 1980s, so clunky!

I really wish I still had my old version of Word which was so incredibly simple. It also had a nice bright background and saving to the desktop took about two seconds. Why have they made the save screen so complex to use - and why the incredibly basic looking background/graphics?

Excel has gone mad. I copy a formula from one cell to another: in the past, the latter cell would show the correct answer to the calculation; now, it shows the answer to the former cell’s calculation, despite the formula being correct! WTF?! 😩

These programs have become too bloody clever for their own good: stuff that worked perfectly well in the past has now been modified to the point that it doesn’t bloody work any more.

Of course, every developer on the planet is grateful - because those Access databases inevitably got too hard for the non-dev users to maintain and so the devs would inherit an absolute mess of a system which they were inevitably expected to replace in a couple of weeks because the entire business had come to depend on it.

Ask me how I know ;)

As for the original topic...this is why I use the open source alternatives - Open Office/LibreOffice pretty much preserves most of the old MS Word functionality with a very similar user interface. They even don't have the bugs of Word which persist to this day (long master documents which can't be opened, anyone?).

Oh what no don't tell me access is gone. I have a database on it I've had since the 90s ! Agree saving and everything is just shit. Bring back WordPerfect

People save things? Isn't autosave on?

I wonder how much of the 80 / 20 rule applies to Word and Excel now?

80% of people use 20% of the functions?

I struggle with all the multiple indexing. Luckily I don't really have to do that a lot in my role. I was just pleased when I managed to make a contents page that reflected the headings and sub headings in the document.

Prefer Google Docs.

MS word is not intuitive!

Google Docs is so user-friendly in comparison. You never have to manually save, and can download in any format. Also really easy to share etc... (And prefer Sheets to Excel!)

I cannot get figures to stay with their correct captions anymore. They all end up in odd places around the document with a random number generator for their figure number. It gives me the rage.

I thought it was just me who found new word terrible

When I open an excel doc, it bizarrely seems to open it twice! I put password in to open original and can work on it, but another box opens saying I have to put the password in again! I have to click on it to close...why??

I teach languages and have to use accents quite a lot, so I know the shortcut codes. For years when you typed, you put in the code and your accented letter would appear when you continued to type your word (so you’d type R-Alt130-m-y and get “Rémy” for example).
Now you have to press an extra key after the accent to make it appear before carrying on, or it misses out your next letter. So I’d have to press m twice to get it to show in the above example. It drives me mad! I either end up with a load of missing letters because I forget, or I have to type significantly slower because I’m concentrating on deliberately misspelling words to make them appear correctly!
Why would you introduce an update that makes the product less functional?!
Rant over, phew! (Not even going to start on Sharepoint 😂)

It's like wrestling with a greasy octopus.

But to save, I just use the little purple icon that looks like an old floppy disc on the very top left above the "File" button.

To save to another drive is a stupid drama now. It used to take a millisecond.

Sharepoint is the biggest heap of shit I have ever used.

I was out of the workplace for the last 10 years or so and came back to Sharepoint which genuinely seems to have taken about 3 steps back from what I was using 10+ years ago.

Sharepoint version of excel is awful. Strike through no longer exists and pivot tables don't work . I almost sent the link to my senior director and luckily noticed some data hadn't pulled through correctly. Redid it and the same error was there. Created it in old excel and it was fine. Now I have to create pivots in old excel and copy and paste into sharepoint

I long for the olden days where you saved your own documents to your pc and there was one place for shared documents. With the advent of 365, Sharepoint, Sway and Teams stuff is in a jumbled mess all over the place. Really hard to find. Also the sheer amd ever growing number of Teams I'm in doesn't help. I think this is the point where I slide towards being a tech dinosaur.

@ntmdino I wouldn't mind if the business would just buy or get the developers to buy me a suitable database to use instead and give me (limited) admin rights to maintain the thing

As far as I can tell
SP is a document storage system not something that is designed to replace MA explorer. You can't even determine that key documents are produced at the top on certain search documents 🤬

That’s the thing - I just want to save stuff to my desktop. Hardly a big ask (you’d have thought) but it seems to do everything it can to make that exceptionally time-consuming and difficult!

I just transfer an old version of Word to each new computer. I am sick of bloody updates, and how they rip you off with subscriptions now. I just want to buy the software once, thanks.

This!! Excel in SP has literally no functionality that's useful, losing work when it somehow cuts the link that it's being edited is a regular trauma 😡

Oh, thank god. I thought it was just me getting old.

It really is painful to use now isnt it. Not intuitive at all and everything takes forever and all the key functions are hidden. I dread each new update and there never seems to be any warning of if happening either.

Yeah, WordPerfect was great.

Coz we're supposed to be 'logged in' to 365 so we're sharing 'ready', whether we like it or not. I like not and often have to remind 365 that I'm not wanting to 'share' until I want to.

Bring back XP - it worked a treat.

You could always learn to code Rails - pretty trivial to create apps with it (especially if you have limited logic), and you can use sqlite as a simple local database.

Fair warning, though - if you're not a developer, it might take you a little while to get there. On the other hand, contract Ruby on Rails devs tend to charge £400-500/day, so it might be worth learning :)

As for Sharepoint...there has never been a time when it wasn't junk. As far as I can tell, it's pretty much designed for consultants to sell into businesses in order to make everything less efficient, so the same consultants can come back and implement a load of processes that require them to be present pretty much forever more.

I've been using different word processors for years, and not found them difficult. Word's ribbon interface exposes quicker access to a lot more frequently used features than classic version, tho I do have word 97 laying around somewhere. I do prefer libre office and Google docs, but Office apps are not terrible. Many people use spreadsheets for inappropriate tasks tho! SharePoint is shite too, a weird blend of wiki & file version control! Access is no substitute for a proper SQL database, with a rich logical method of querying data

Someone mentioned finding files after saving:

1. In the file manager on the left is a recently used option, choose it to see a list of recently used files. Right click on a recently used file and one of the menu options is to open the folder it's been saved to.
2. If you have word app saved to the task bar at the bottom, put mouse over it to see a list of recently opened word files. You can choose to pin some permanently to that list.
3. Open a new blank document, choose to save and note the folder. Unless you chose a folder to save a doc you now can't find that's the default place it would've been saved.

Someone must have named the law that blights modern life, the one where software developers constantly 'upgrade' stuff so they keep their jobs, to the point where once great products become almost unusable. Unplanned obsolescence? The law of infinite meddling?

We can't do that. We're not allowed to use old software that is no longer supported.

My main issue is how obsessed Word is with saving to OneDrive rather than locally. Anything saved locally will automatically sync with OneDrive anyway.

And Windows obsession with you logging on with a Microsoft account. Someone in work checked their Hotmail account, and ended up with their personal email as their login to their work PC. And it's me who has to fix that sort of thing.