Friday's rant is not so forgiving

RE: Office 2007

Dear Microsoft

Why do you insist on trying to make things "easier" for us by removing our control? Why do you clutter our screens with ribbons full of features for which we already have the keyboard shortcuts under our fingers, while hiding the occasionally needed features that we used to be able to find so quickly in the menus.

At the same time, why do you make it so difficult to permanently hide those "default" themes, style sheets and font sets of yours, which we know we will never want. Why do you not provide a single dialog box in which the features of a theme or style set can be viewed, analysed and modified? And why must you establish three or four ways of doing anything, so that turning off one of those "helpful features" (such as the one that decides we want to create a bulleted list when we want to do nothing of the sort or the one that thinks superscripted ordinals look good) requires changing the settings in several places before it sticks.

Oh, and why do you insist on trying to make Word a sub-desktop publishing program? There are really good programs specifically designed for that kind of work, and not all of them are thousand-dollar behemoths. Word is a word-processing program and when it comes to designing or publishing documents it's an unwieldy mess. Except now it's an unwieldy mess when it comes to word-processing too.  Grr.

Bring on Dark Room I say! (Write Room for home.)