How do I get rid of ribbons and go back to old office menus?

Ha!  I do miss WordPerfect and would still be using it if our clients hadn't been lured to Word.  The file conversion didn't work well.  Need to take another look at WP Office.

And I still insist on a rigorous discipline on file naming convention.  In fact when some Sharepoint gold partner notified me that folder and file names were irrelevant in the face of the mighty Sharepoint search engine, I tore up his consulting agreement and sent him off.  It was my first hint that Sharepoint was not for us.

I take your stance as a compliment ;-), though I was long out of my short pants when I worked on an Atari 400 then Commodore 64, programming Basic at school and then these spectacular 80/86 at work, from WordPerfect to MS Word for DOS when one had time to make a new pot of coffee while having a desktop computer sort alphabetically a clients addresses and phone number table !

Do you remember how people had to be methodical in their file naming strategy. We seem so far from that 8 digits one period and a 3 digit extension era.

First, an apology for my initial vitriol. (...)

My job list is already pretty lengthy.  (...)

--> Thank you. I sometimes get so task oriented that I forget that we are all humans and placed in tough situations and need to ventilate to peers who get it sometimes. Inefficiency is one of my pet peeves so I do get what you are saying and I know much about how keeping up with technology is chewing up personal time rather than freeing it! I also want to say that i appreciate greatly the time you have put into this post, as you bring up critical points in a manner that is rational and makes total sense and certainly rally a lot of IT professionals facing the same challenges. How could we make that yield to and open discussion with Ms?

 

Or hire a consultant.  What would it cost to hire a consultant to come in, setup templates, and a sharepoint server, etc.?  (...)  I don't know the answer, but to many, the choice is made to simply allow the users to muddle through and eat the productivity hit, or simply require their salaried users to absorb the cost through longer hours to make up the difference.  Which means that for every one of those companies, the answer is that the cost is unreasonable, they are just passing it on for the moment.

--> Indeed. My former employer refused to train employees, despite that i suggested a lunch&learn or something so that they grasp some stuff that they needed on their daily tasks. As a result, I would spend -daily- 40 to 50% of my time answering the same questions, fixing the same issues over and over, support had become my job, because I was the only one who could provide these answers: the IT dept was already saturated with the architecture and the hardware. During my time there, the staff grew from 80 to 150. And they usually came to me after having tried to do it themselves for 10-20 min. [quick formula  avg salary*3stuck-ations daily *150 people = 3605$ loss daily!]  I would do my own job after hours. As a result, i was burn-out of overtime!

--> But one point to note here is that people were already 2007 or 2010 users. So the issue is not always the UI changes but the assumption that basic word processing is common knowledge. If you give people rulers, compass and pencils and tell them to draw a polygon with the measurements; they probably will get it since everybody learns that in elementary school. But ask of the same people to do that on Paint and that will be a whole other story (don't even try with AutoCAD).

-->The week that I finally got to do a L&L, interruption for support dropped by 70%!  Another good thing about group trainings in the work place: there will always be a few  smarty pants that will get it and to whom the quick questions will be directed during the work day.

 

Microsoft missed the boat with Word (as well as other parts of the Office suite). Sure, you can do all sorts of powerful, geewhiz stuff. But you won't find 10% of companies who need any of that. And within those companies, I don't imagine that the majority of their users would have much use for it either. For the small percentage who can take advantage of it, it is probably great. But for everyone else, it is just extra time and cost.

--> I suspect MS is aware somewhat of the issue... why would they have launched "Starter" if not for that reason. But Starter was just a limited piece of ....   that was really no option cuz it would not do what people need their word processor to do.

 

Most people really don't know how to use Word.  They just know how to use Word for the tasks they need.  Those people don't need to know how to use Word.

--> There, I disagree with you... The worst Word users IMO, are the ones who think they know how to use Word for their tasks. They might be indeed using the right word processing techniques to do what they want to do. But my experience has shown me that its often not the case and, when several users work as a team, the discrepancies between the techniques yield to lots of time losses. Word offers many ways to do certain things and not all those ways are appropriate in a work sharing environment. As an example, people often use without differentiation the page break and the section break (which ever they find first) and do not know each distinct usage and the consequence of using them.

This would probably be less of an issue, if any of my users were in Office all day long.  But, they aren't.  They use other applications for the bulk of the day, and Office as needed, which makes the pain of the additional cost that much more acute, and value so greatly reduced.

 

I struggle to come up with any model where the cost to get everything in place to make the newer versions of office as efficient as the older versions for our staff would not far outweigh the cost of the inefficiencies given that a new release occurrs every 2-3 years requiring overhauling much of that new overhead every time.   And this is something that I would guess to be true for most small to medium businesses.

--> I have developed such model and it could be of mutual interest to sharing my findings. My email is my nick name above, with hotmail dot com.

(...)

And as long as I have experienced users who beg to hold on to their 6 year old XP boxes because they dislike the new version of Office that comes with a new box (...) Being forced to get used to something with no real benefit is the wrong path.

--> BTDT. I had to live through that onward and backward: after adapting to 2010, I got to work for a law firm working still on 2003. So I was spending days on 2003 and evenings on 2010! They had invested a lot of programming in customization so they were taking their time to prepare migration (500 stations require planning). So I found myself looking for commands yet again, and saying often, oh darn... but we can do that in 2010!  So that is some sort of good news: there were lots of stuff I hated to lose in the retrograde. Building blocks among others. For the 2003 techniques that were more efficient, I simply added the commands on custom groups on the ribbon.

(...)  I do find fault in the logic that would inspire that Doctor to talk about the virutes of losing both legs above the knee, and even promotes voluntarily having legs removed reasoning that there are prosthetics that can do things your legs couldn't do before (post digger attachments, pogo stick attachments, etc.), and that they can hire physical therapists to eventually get back to functioning similarly to how they did before, or that they can go out and buy an electric wheelchair which provides some features that their legs did not (like a built in seat) and it still gets them from point A to point B just like their legs did.  Or the doctor that thinks that criticism/complaints about removing their legs due to the life long medical costs, or the pain of the procedure, or the lack of practical advantage is whining.

 

There is no choice for the person in the car wreck, but it doesn't make it something to be thrilled about either.

--> Point taken wholeheartedly ;)