Checking style in proofing in Word 2016

Stop trying to defend this idiotic move, Suzanne.  

"Removed to improve them"?  How stupid do you think we are to believe that a tool needs to be removed to be improved, especially by a company such as MS?!?  We didn't lose our toolbar while MS made changes.  Please!!  You insult us!!

Your 350 page thesis was, I am sure, written much more slowly than it would have been if it were written on a word processor that had appropriate features. I want to be as productive as possible, not use archaic tools just because I let a company dictate my tool set. I can buy a tool from another company.

Also, not everyone who uses Word is an academic. Most are not. Business-people who use Word are not "scholars" and just need the software to work and work well. They do not need to be proud of their grammar.

Meanwhile, Microsoft cannot claim that these features were removed "to save space" if they are also claiming they want to restore these features. That seems irrational, unless they only wanted to save space on the launch of the product, to mislead their consumers about the true space cost of Word, which is unethical.

Yes, my paper was written very slowly, over many drafts on canary yellow copy paper, eventually approved by my thesis advisor, before being typed onto blue-ruled Corrasable Bond thesis paper using an IBM Selectric (notCorrecting). A word processor would have saved considerable time in the production (though it was the research and writing that were time-consuming), especially in the final draft, which required frequent changes of type balls for italics and Greek, and manually rolling the carriage down for superscript numerals (at least I was allowed to use endnotes; footnotes, which I often had to use for papers I typed later for hire, often required retyping a page if I miscalculated). I do not deny that word processors have made work a lot easier for us all--and those of us who have not always had them probably appreciate them more than others.

As for non-academic Word users, I was replying directly to a post that referenced "anyone who does scholastic writing."

Nowhere have I seen the claim (certainly not from Microsoft) that these features were removed "to save space." The explanation that has been provided was that they were removed to improve them. Perhaps a better decision would have been to leave the old, unimproved tools in place until the new, improved ones were available, but I get the sense (based on correspondence with those who are working on the project) that this is presenting unanticipated problems and taking longer than expected.

Having worked at Microsoft and having had some interactions with the Office group in the early 2000s, I have to sigh at this ongoing discussion.  Most of the issues here are not the result of some malicious intent to save money and/or back out of useful features.  They result from a lack of vision and stubbornness that was quite apparent in the team then and apparently is still in play.  

After all, MS acquired Word in the 80s to help bootstrap its desktop publishing business and it has (mostly) allowed its engineering sensibilities to guide Word's future directions--adding features, some half baked, without a clear strategy for a few decades.  Some really helpful features were so poorly implemented and hidden that it took users several versions to discover and exploit them.

Now the team appears to be moving in the direction of lightweight touch-screen apps in an attempt to win the millennial market that has been moving to Apple and Google in droves.  So maybe itisthrowing out the baby with the bathwater.

But if that's the case, it is completely missing the mark for its Office franchise, at least in the case of Word. (The excel team seems a bit more grounded and sees the future in big data [admittedly an easier slog].)    

The current state of Word is stasis.  The team should be exploring UI efficiencies and back-end big-data analytics integration for its grammar/spelling features.  Instead, it seems to be backing out of these "esoteric" features that aren't as sizzling as touch-screen swiping!  

Imagine a future version of Word that allowed a writer to toggle to a dashboard that used cloud services to completely evaluate a document, based on grammar, style, similar patterns [plagiarism and morel], readability.....

Just look at how a simple app like easybib has made inroads into reference formatting.

It's evident the product managers in the Office group missing the boat (Word 2013 would have flagged this cliche).