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by MoonWalk 181 days ago
Word's "ribbon" is a shitshow, and has been since day one.

It's depressing to read about Word's entrenchment. This entire once-great application is now an execrable mess, with menus scattered under cryptic buttons (and abridged into dumbed-down menus that require you to expose yet another, collapsed one to access essential, frequently-used functions), a file... thing (not even a dialog, let alone a proper File dialog) that shows you a canned list of locations in a UI that appears to consist only of text...

The style-handling is even messed up, once one of Word's great strengths.
3 comments
sfRattan 181 days ago
I will say in favor of the ribbon: it still fully supports KeyTips (a.k.a tapping Alt and then a series of letters to navigate a software menu). So much Electron-based slop software out there doesn't support any sort of keyboard navigation of the application at all.

I do find the ribbon somehow weirdly intuitive for navigating with the keyboard, but it was of course possible to navigate drop-down menus in the exact same way (Alt and a series of underlined letters) for years before that. And still is... When developers bother to write robust software.

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fractallyte 181 days ago
Totally agree.

On the rare occasions when I'm forced to use Word, I find it an incomprehensible mess. I don't understand why users continue to tolerate it.

There is other software: LibreOffice and SoftMaker Office are close enough to be familiar to any casual user, and WordPerfect was always an excellent word processor!

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alsetmusic 179 days ago
> On the rare occasions when I'm forced to use Word, I find it an incomprehensible mess. I don't understand why users continue to tolerate it.

Some comments above focus on legal docs. I've provided support to practicing lawyers. They don't have time to learn new tools that maybe support the majority of what they need because people on this site know there are alternatives. They're locked into Word so that they can focus on the part of their work for which they are trained and it's not software like you or me.

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IAmBroom 181 days ago
One of the WEIRDEST features of Word is that it (silently) retains keycombos that refer to a menu structure that was replaced many versions ago... simply to avoid irritating customers with trained reflexes.

Ctrl-o? Selects the Home menu.

Followed by 'e'? Deselects the Home menu, and presents the "Select Case" subwindow... like it did when it was on the Format menu, which no longer exists.

Documentation for this? Um, well...

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