BBspot has an informative article on the new features available in Office 2003. These days, I just use OpenOffice.org for my word processing & spreadsheet needs (yeah, the “.org” is part of the app’s name). But, even back when I still used MS Office, I stopped upgrading after Office 97.
Not that Office 95 was that bad a program, but Office 97 did offer some legitimate improments (especially since Office 95 was the first Office for win32). But, after that, it seemed that Microsoft just kept adding obscure features to future Office versions in its attempt to justify the upgrades. But, even Office XP acts just about the same as Office 97.
So, I was especially intrigued by BBspot’s article detailing the new features in Office 2003, including these:
Word selection enhancements — It’s even harder to select less than a single word. Select two letters and the whole word is highlighted. Select a word and the whole sentence is highlighted. Select a sentence and a word in a random document on your hard drive is deleted.
Improved proprietary formats — Keep information private by making sure no other program from any other manufacturer can open your documents.
Features buried much deeper Average menu depth has been increased to 7.4/item across the entire Office 2003 line making sure you don't accidentally select something you didn't want to.
Office is like a hungry fat man that just won’t leave the kitchen. It takes over everything, and just gets more bloated with every iteration.
There’s a lot of that going around. Paint Shop Pro made it a point to muck up a lot of the menu commands in the new release (8.0).
I was used to bringing up the last file I worked on by hitting Alt-F then 1, or the next to last file with Alt-F and 2. Now, though, recent files are buried in under another level of submenus.
And for no good reason the totally mucked up most of the menu commands so they no longer start with the same hotkeys.
All these software companies seem to be following Bill Gates’ lead, and that ain’t a good thing …