feature # 457941 in microsoft word

As many of you know, I'm a fan of plain text. I don't really care very much about fonts or colors or underlining stuff, and I use 'vi' whenever I can. I've had a lot of people ask me why I don't use 'word' as much and my response is, I don't have the need for it. But, I hadn't realized how some of the features in word could make my life so much easier. I've been making do without those features, but I've been trading productivity. I know, I'm a little 'behind', and all this sounds so 1998. And, if you're wondering how I made it through Cisco, I used Adobe Framemaker (that's right) to write up documents then.

I've been spending a lot of time reading and reviewing documents and proposals of late. And features that I've found tremendously useful in Word are the "view side by side" and "synchronous scrolling" features. Since I'm dogfooding the beta of Office 2007, here I was all giddy about how cool these features were and how they were new in Word 2007, and I was telling a friend about it when she gave me the "and why did Microsoft hire you? " look. Apparently these features have been around since Word 2003. Doh!

Frankly, I don't think I would've stumbled upon these features if it weren't for the way the icons are organized in 2007. Maybe 2007 will give me the impetus to start using Excel as well. My colleagues have been very vocal about how they hate it when I send emails with tables in them that look like this :

|---------------------------|
| Col A | Col B | Col C  |
|---------------------------|
|    1    |    2    |   3      |
|---------------------------|

Toodles,

"ai"

Technorati tags: microsoft word, microsoft word 2003, microsoft word 2007, office 2003, office 2007, vi, vim, adobe framemaker, view side by side, synchronous scrolling, plain text, excel, ribbon, ribbon ui