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?

Oh god. Teams.

I'm not in the UK and during the pandemic taught for 2 whole academic years on G-Suite. We were locked down on 9th March and our kids had their first lessons on 12th. Worked perfectly. Meetings, software, all intuitive. Lessons prepared on Presentations (slides) downloaded as pdfs, popped into each Classroom. Marking stuff handed in- a doddle.

In the summer I work for an organisation that's using Teams and 365. I have Office on my computer at home and do what I need to on it. But Teams in particular is so unintuitive. We never needed any training for G-Suite because it was all so logical.

@cakeorwine I'm suprised to hear 80% use as much as of 20% functions!!

Would complete belive it if you'd said 90% use less than 10%.

Absolutely this. It's a pain in the arse now!

I work for an organisation that uses google drive, two that use 365 and one that saves things to a network drive with a server that gets backed up.

I cant work out how to attach a google doc to an outlook email.

I don't know what you mean by the black screen? I just have a white sheet... I don't see a black screen.
What really annoys me is track changes! When you need to accept them and just have a clean sheet (final document) and the bloody track changes stay there! I accept all the changes, still there. I turn off the "mark up", still there. I copy and paste the whole lot in to a new document and they're still there!

Oh I hate the new format. I bought myself a lovely chromebook for uni thinking all I need is word and I will manage with the sharepoint thing.

First essay - make a PowerPoint with charts etc. (Never had to use pp for any essay before)
And nope you can't get charts on the online version of Microsoft 365 it needs to be downloaded to your laptop. Can I download 365 to my laptop, no, because its a chromebook.

Don't get me started on the fact they then want the PowerPoint document copied and pasted into a word document for submission. It doesn't work. 🥴

Ctrl-Z undoes the automatic formatting attempts immediately.

I find it far more rage inducing to be attempting to work on Google Sheets, only to witness some knob apply filters, hiding and locking rows/columns and the most disgusting basic fill colours in the known universe when you are clearly already using it. And those bastarding drop downs that are in a tiny, tiny font and take forever to select compared to typing in the first couple of letters. Stop doing it. This is exactly why MS had the locked for editing thing.

And then when you try and go back to it, having given up in disgust, that same knob has moved the entire folder 'somewhere'. That and the inability for it to listen when you apply a date format - no Google, if I tell you I want the format to be DD-MMM-YYYY for the entire column & centred horizontally and vertically, that means I want all of the entries in that column to be in the format, not for you to decide that, actually, we're going to have a handful of entries hh:mm MM/DD/YY, left/bottom aligned and you can't change it back, any attempt will result in it completely changing from what you wanted (05-Nov-2015, for example) to 23:32 11/5/15 to 12345 or 5/15/11 or what random combination of numbers it feels like doing.

Having said that, I am somewhat irritated that I'm going to have to piss around with code to get a bunch of Access files created in 32 bit to work on a 64 bit machine. At least I can

a) keep the live stuff running on an ancient PC
b) sandbox the version I'm going to fuck about with knowing that the originals are still happily pootling along unmolested with the SQL server
c) tweak cfms without finding some other fucker has started moving shit around because they don't think anybody needs it
d) because it's old and uses code, most people who for some reason believe they should have access to server files when they can barely apply spell check or proofread something on a daily basis will stay the fuck away if they stumble upon it, thinking it's probably got an ancient curse embedded into the code that they might unleash if they say the words out loud.

When you've had Google imposed upon you by people who have no idea what goes on under the bonnet, Microsoft suddenly looks so, so much better - the multiple integrations and syncs with external packages are a pain, but at least they can generally work (although some really, really don't like One Drive) - Google doesn't bother with that sort of thing, because obviously, they want you to do everything with them as though they're a poundshop Apple.

Comments... I have a feeling you're all using diff version of MSWord than me because I don't recognise most of these problems. The problem I do have is when you have to press "send" to save a comment and "edit" to edit it. WTF. All these extra steps in order to do something so simple. In my line of work, we use-write-edit-delete comments liberally. So this is constant nuisance.

It's Better than when we used to get warnings "This document has comments in it!!" when we tried to save. Er yes, I am an adult, I can manage the comment content, most of my collaborators won't freeze in terror at sight of a comment. We don't write rude embarrassing words in the comments. It's cool. Chill.

Constant Autosave is a problem, because now I have to think about saving my own versions any time we might do major edits that could actually go very wrong. Supposed to be able to restore previous versions but that doesn't work right anymore, either.

While we're whinging about MS products.... why can't I share Outlook calendars across organisations, or turn auto-forwarding on for emails, even if the calendar sharing is no more detailed than saying 'busy' 'OofO' 'tentative' etc.? I have 2 work diaries & a private diary to coordinate when I plan meetings or private appointments, it's a headache. From main employer, I use incognito browser (because main employer certificates & cookies won't let me use other MSoft credentials otherwise) to log into minor employer, add calendars for colleagues as necessary, also get up my personal diary (Google Calendar), and have to scan thru all 3 to make a dentist appointment or a work meeting.

Really, in 2023? When 2 of them are MSoft in closely collaborating organisations? Argh.

People save things? Isn't autosave on?

I hate autosave. I hate it in excel too. I like to try things out before I save my changes. Most of the changes I make I undo.

Ha ha so true and so bloody annoying

Dont forget car manufacturers too.
Lane bloody assist?!
Digital displays for everything even radio and the heating/cooling system. Aaaah!!

Yes I do that. Its great until I need to reset a password ( the every 12 weeks ones ) or they needed 12 characters and a symbol and obviously you can’t reuse. The need for new passwords combined with historic ones on five different devices is beyond me.

Love auto save until you have to save it not on the cloud and then forget it turns itself off.
I loved the designer in PowerPoint until you save that on your desktop and then the designer function has gone so you can’t change anything.
And loads of other stuff that makes life harder.

We've moved to LibreOffice (opens Word docs and Excel created in Microsoft) and instead of Outlook use Thunderbird (also free). Not just a result of the unnecessary changes to Microsoft but also because they kept locking us out of our 365 account, making us change passwords on their whim and the final straw was requiring photo identification for all users (we had a 5 user licence). They really have forgotten about their end user....

I don’t mind google sheets or docs, what’s wrong with them?

I don't use PowerPoint very much, but I'm sure I've exported files to Word? Copying and pasting seems like an insane way of doing it.

@BurbleBumleBleep

If it needs numbers and special characters you just do as you suggest but start with something like

01BumbleBeeBurpNewLook@

Of course different ones go up at different rates but you can at least limit your guesses.

We use both. Moved to Google for emails as it was free (we're a charity), that was ok, except some people wanted to stick with Outlook which was a pain to set up, especially when they have 10's of thousands of emails.

Then we got 365 - for free again - as we needed Teams and we can't have unsupported software so it also meant we would always be up-to-date with Office plus with OneDrive everything is backed up. I had to set all this up, and then I have to fix it when, for example, OneDrive suddenly switches accounts, nobody can find anything they've saved, the Outlook people accidentally send emails from the Microsoft account rather than Gmail...

And Teams is a nightmare compared to Zoom. So many people can use Zoom fine but struggle with Teams.

I love Excel now. It's just got better and better over the years. I first used it at college around 2002 when Power Pivot was probably still a germ of an idea in someone's brain. Now we have that and Power Query and dynamic array formulas and all sorts of wonderfulness. For the casual user who just needs to sum up a few columns, maybe some bits of it are less straightforward, but for those of us who use it in anger, it's amazing.

I hate Word though and always have done. Why does the formatting suddenly change halfway through a sentence? Why can I never control how tables behave across multiple pages? It's all just so annoying.

I hate auto save. Yes, I know it's my fault and I should remember that auto save is on but I don't. Which means I am forever writing over documents and then hoping that version history has the original!

Just a PSA on attachments - please don't without a specific reason, links are so much better!

1. links mean you control who has access to see vs edit etc.

2. links mean there is only one working version, so anyone who needs to use it knows they are using the most up to date version!

3. Emails with attachments use way more carbon than those with links - think of that scaled up to the huge number of emails sent per year and it really does make a difference! https://www.mxhero.com/amp/save-the-planet-replace-email-attachments-with-file-share-links

@EnterFunnyNameHere the problem with links is that the document is often stored in a folder of SP that the receiver doesn't have access to, nor do you want them to.

I even protected on spreadsheet to give other users read access only and guess what they then couldn't use the filters on it 🤬

I will look at it again and see if I can tweak permissions but it's time and mental energy I just don't have.

Auto Save doesn't work if the documents are password protected 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

You can still use undo with auto save. And repeat last command / redo. Auto save doesn't stop that and you can even revert back to a previous version of a whole document.

It does take a bit of time to get used to it, but it is way better in the long run (in my opinion). If you right click a document to share it, it should come up with a little info box where you can set who can access (pick "people you name" and put in their email) and what level of access they have (read only vs edit) etc. That's what it looks like on mine.

With excel, in the Protect Sheet/Workbook area there is a big list of what you're protecting, so you can selectively lock different parameters 😊

I'm going to risk sounding patronising (Sorry!!) - I did fall into the same trap of not remembering which folder I'd saved the document/file to and my solution is to either jot down the location or I reopen the file and it shows at the top in the middle of the screen what the file path is.

I agree the "recent files" list is not 100% failsafe or reliable, quite hit and miss at times. I try the recent files first, just in case (!) then if it doesn't come up (possibly it's slow server updates, server availability etc, Cloud is often a victim of bandwidth and slow updates), I've got my written reminder of where I saved it, or remind myself in the file itself, and can then browse to the file rather than aimlessly searching around and getting hugely frustrated.

YANBU! We have moved to sharepoint and one drive at work it is a absolute nightmare trying to find anything, trying to save it so other peoples can actually see it!

It has make life REALLY difficult I just want to do my freaking job!