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How to avoid being "upgraded to Win 10" against your will:


dencorso

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Well, anxious friends, we've all saved Win 7 from GWX and most here are also still saving XP (thanks to jaclaz, dencorso and others in the XP POS thread).

I'm a commercial real estate lawyer; I only pretend to be a geek.  Win 7 doesn't bother me so much - it's OK even if not as good as XP.

What really stinks is MS Word.  For the legal profession, it's a wrongly conceived, badly designed piece of garbage that would never have been adopted but for its MS monopoly push onto the world's PCs.  (In the early 2000's, all our clients stopped paying additional to keep WordPerfect, a far better program.)  And Word gets tangibly worse with each new version.

For me, Word's the real horror, and one I have to face every day.  If you ever see a picture of Bill Gates with a black eye, you'll know I finally had a a chance to thank him.

Edited by glnz
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It's that way for the non-legal profession too.

I'm on Office 2010, which doesn't seem one iota better to me than Office 2003 (the last one I used for a long time) to be brutally honest.  It has 64 bit applications, and actually runs properly in Win 8.1, but that's it.  No new value to be found, but some new quirks.

I tried to be a subscriber - I did a stint with Office 365 in 2014 and 2015.  Lifeless polar bear in a snowstorm themes for everything?  Expiring scroll bars?  Seriously?  I ditched that subscription when I was able to find a legitimate new old stock license for Office 2010.  What a right move and happy improvement!

Computers are thousands of times more powerful now than in the 1980s, yet the state of the art in document processing hasn't advanced in any substantial way beyond the first shots at WSIWYG.

Quote

Win 7 doesn't bother me so much - it's OK even if not as good as XP.

There are a LOT of things that can be done to bring back the usability of XP to Win 7.  Start a thread some time to discuss just that; a lot of us will contribute I'm sure.

It's even true of Windows 8.1 - the last perpetually licensable version of Windows, which is still (barely) capable of being molded into a lean, mean workhorse - and the version I've stopped on.

-Noel

Edited by NoelC
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Might not be sophisticated enough for your office but for daily home use LibreOffice is pretty good. I had it installed for a while and rarely used it then I started to use it everyday. In the end I converted all my docs to LibreOffice .odt format and now only ever use Word if I have to communicate with folks that totally insist on a Word .doc format file. And, of course, LibreOffice is free (though people should try an make a donation).

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1 hour ago, glnz said:

Well, anxious friends, we've all saved Win 7 from GWX and most here are also still saving XP (thanks to jaclaz, dencorso and others in the XP POS thread).

I'm a commercial real estate lawyer; I only pretend to be a geek.  Win 7 doesn't bother me so much - it's OK even if not as good as XP.

What really stinks is MS Word.  For the legal profession, it's a wrongly conceived, badly designed piece of garbage that would never have been adopted but for its MS monopoly push onto the world's PCs.  (In the early 2000's, all our clients stopped paying additional to keep WordPerfect, a far better program.)  And Word gets tangibly worse with each new version.

For me, Word's the real horror, and one I have to face every day.  If you ever see a picture of Bill Gates with a black eye, you'll know I finally had a a chance to thank him.

What aspect of Word do you dislike? (Not being argumentative, but genuinely curious as there are some things about Word that I don't like.)

BTW it's too late to say that you only pretend to be a geek. By virtue of having found MSFN, you're already a geek.  :)

--JorgeA

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Styles and section breaks.  They should never have been invented.  WordPerfect didn't have them.

I can use them successfully.  But there is not a single other lawyer or secretary who can.  Not their fault - they are completely non-intuitive and useless.  Documents get emailed around, revised by different firms with different style sets and end up with massive formatting problems.  No one's styles are like anyone else's.  Nobody switches from styles to manual formatting consistently.  I learned my way as a defensive measure - to be able to unscrew the mess at 1am when there's no one else around to help (and most can't anyway).

And of course the ribbon in Word 2010 killed my keyboard skills from Word 2003.

And on and on.

Edited by glnz
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Well, I own two Office 97, four Office 2000 and three Office 2007 licences. All are permanent licences, so I really don't see why in the world I'd have to updgrade 'em. At present I use one 97 and all four 2000 licences, and the wife uses two 2007 ones (she actually *likes* it). with the compatibility packs, I've never yet found any document or spreadsheet I couldn't access/read/modify/print. So, I really don't know what forces others not to keep using what remains working just as it always did. Of course, when not using one's own machine, it's different. But who can be half as productive in a public/shared machine, anyway, as one is when using one's own?

BTW, @glnz, you've passed the 150 posts mark some time ago, so it's now irreversible... (of course, you can remain in denial, but you'll eventually reach self-acceptance) you've morphed into a die-hard geek, already!!! :yes:

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In my line of work, we sometimes use section breaks. They're useful if you have, say, part of a page in double-column format, sandwiched between parts that are in the standard single column. As for styles, I only remember ever using them once, to help a customer prepare a book for publication. Otherwise we simply format each title or header individually as needed: it's easier to remember a title's format than to remember to apply its specific style. :)

But I can see how either of these features could wreak havoc if files are being passed around among a variety of people.

For me, the main annoyance is the Ribbon menus. Been using Office 2007 for going on eight years, and I'm still hunting around for the commands I need. The drop-down menus in Word 2000 (and 2003) were so much easier to use.

As a result, I've been considering switching to the SoftMaker office suite, which uses traditional menus and is like 99% compatible with Office files; the only trouble I've had in my tryouts is with the mathematical formula editor, an obscure feature. I'll probably stay on Office 2007 until it becomes incompatible with emerging file formats, and then switch over to the current version of SoftMaker.

--JorgeA

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3 minutes ago, JorgeA said:

For me, the main annoyance is the Ribbon menus. Been using Office 2007 for going on eight years, and I'm still hunting around for the commands I need. The drop-down menus in Word 2000 (and 2003) were so much easier to use.

YES!!! If Tihiy had created "RibbonNuker" instead of StartIsBack, I'd've been his 1st client for that! :yes:

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3 hours ago, JorgeA said:

What aspect of Word do you dislike? (Not being argumentative, but genuinely curious as there are some things about Word that I don't like.)

Not asked of me, but I'll give my insight.  As an engineer I figured out how to make Word sing a long time ago.  I do decently structured documents (even ones with section breaks, which convert to PDF really well, and even have useful hyperlinks).  I was the one tasked with creating templates back when I did a lot of documentation in the corporate world.  But if they didn't start with my templates (and sometimes even if they did) almost no one else saw fit to actually use anything more than the very most basic WSIWYG features. 

People in general apparently don't like to think first then work.

Result?

Documents that are one-off - i.e., only good one time on one system and which are un-maintainable.  Why?  Because they're double-spaced by hitting return twice, formatted by hitting tab or the spacebar enough times, have no font consistency, use only one style throughout, aren't organized by an outline hierarchy, etc.  I was helping someone just a week ago who put new lines in their resume by typing sufficient blanks after the last word they wanted on the previous line.  A simple font change destroyed the document.

I guess if I had to sum it up:  It's actually easy and elegant to do things "right" once you know how, but it's hard to learn how so people just avoid it.  They do as little as possible THIS time to get THIS job "done".

I figured, many years ago, that we'd have AI by now that would be like a secretary behind the scenes.  Sure, there's some of that in the later versions, but it's not really foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

-Noel

Edited by NoelC
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Noel - you are 100% on target.  You are an engineer.  Of course you're going to think about understanding the rules of the app and how to use them consistently and efficiently.  But even if you were emailing long Word docs to other engineers only, they would have their own understandings and the docs (after revisions) would come back with a mish-mash of approaches.

Now imagine very long docs that are emailed around for layer after layer of revisions and are NEVER ONCE handled by engineers.  And later they are copied as starting points for the next transaction.  (Or pages from a number of long docs are copied and pasted together to make a new doc.)

Styles are the worst.  When I must clean up a doc, it takes a long time, and then when I send it back to the source, they resent not having the mish-mash of styles they were working with.

Word has been a huge, uglifying time-waster for the legal profession.  Its fundamental design is wrong.

Edited by glnz
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Right!  Kudos to you; VERY few folks take the time to clean things up so that life can actually get better moving forward. 

Most folks seem to follow a philosophy of "It's someone else's mess, right, so why should *I* have to clean it up?"

-Noel

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Noel - thanks, but the problem is even worse.  It's not clear in Word HOW to clean it up.  It's way too hard for non-engineers (or would-be geeks) to do.  And it gets harder with every new version of Word.

Only MS's monopoly power inflicted Word on us.  Nobody thought it was better than WordPerfect or any of the few other programs then popular.  When I first made the switch in 2002 (even before we were emailing docs as much as now), I was appalled how bad was Word.  It was at least three steps backwards.  The head of our word processing department agreed - we said to each other unprompted that it was a garbage program.

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We are way OT here :) but...

I happily used WordStar for many years until customers started sending me (and asking for) documents in Word (.DOC) format and I had to bite the bullet. :}

--JorgeA

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