Every large company is made up of thousands of individual people, many of which really care about making a good product and making customers happy. The whole question in managing a big company is how to get out of the way of that natural process, while still coordinating all the disparate groups so that the final product works.
MS Office is, for good and ill, exactly what you get when you give users what they ask for and have no taste.
The decision may not have been up to you to keep it all in one Word document but making the case to either break apart the document or find a better system in which to maintain it ought to be easy in the face of the usability issues you mention.
This is like saying that SQLite is not a good product because you are using it on a Terabyte database having 1,000,000 hits at the same time... It might work but it would have problems because wasn't designed for that scenario.
I sympathize with you though... since it is not your decision :/
Some coworkers of mine have to deal with CSV/TSV imports from enterprise customers, and the amount of clearly broken scripts is pretty bad.
That excel import preview dialog helps non-programmers try to fix these issues beforehand. If that wasn't there, it'd likely be impossible for these people to know where to begin trying to fix the import.
You may have non-standard CSV files (or at least delimited files that are not properly escaped)
So you're saying you haven't really used Word 2013 then?
PS: Office 2013 still has bugs from word 97, which is what happens when there is zero competition.
Based on just that, I don't think you have used Office in a really long time.
So imagine you have 4 authors: person A writes a document, and person B makes one set of changes, while person C makes a different set of changes, with person D working off of C’s version. Now person A wants to accept some but not all of C’s changes, and some but not all of B’s changes, and person D wants to “rebase” his document to add the changes that A approved from B and C, but not the changes that A did not approve...
How do you handle it? You’re saying MS word now has a solution for this that avoids conflicts? I guess I’m not enough of a power user to know about it.
Okay, now imagine that you want to both want to open and type on the same document at the same time, real-time-collaboration style. You’re saying Word has a solution for this one too?
Word has great co-authoring support if you use Word Online (free equivalent of Google Docs which the desktop/tablet/phone client can work with natively), SharePoint, or Office 365.
Those who use it with any regularity likely know the keyboard shortcuts for things they use regularly, and the ribbon should work for finding the less common things in the same way it helps me as a casual user find everything.
It would seem that most UX people now agree with me, as traditional menu bars have been de-emphasised across nearly all the apps I use. Word was the only app which required me to delve into the menus in common use.
Why do you think the ribbon bar has a worse UX than a menu bar?
For anyone for who changes do just that, check this out, which I think is the most impressive example of data-driven UI design ever documented even remotely this well: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/table-of-...
I love the ribbon. If you don't, try one of two things. One, try double-clicking on one of the headers - it'll make the ribbon hide unless you click it. This makes it effectively work like the old menus, except more horizontal and graphical instead of vertical.
The second is to scroll your mouse wheel while hovering over the ribbon.
Once someone tries to muck with settings for individual pieces external of the style then it just goes to hell. I wish they'd take all the formatting tools out of toolbar and only have them accessible via the style formatter.
Convincing.
Yeah it's easy to get listened to by Microsoft, just go create the most popular web-comic in the world and they'll get in touch. Anyone can do it.