As I’ve intimated said [UPDATE: Becky made me use a less colorful word] before, I’m using the Microsoft Word Notebook layout for taking notes in class, and for writing case briefs. It’s a fairly neat idea, and doesn’t require as much of a mental leap as does the transition from say, Word to OneNote. But, aside from the speed of running the application using Rosetta, I have a few other quibbles. It’s probably too late to have these corrected for the next version of Office for the Mac, but I’ll at least post them here and submit the product feedback to Microsoft for future iterations. And, if that fails, maybe I’ll make something myself one day. Without further ado, my bitch list:
- I need to be able to indent/outdent only one section at a time, regardless of whether or not there are other sections below it. The behavior that I’ve seen is that when you do move a section above, all sections below are automatically moved accordingly. Sometimes this is what I want, and sometimes it is not. I really would appreciate a way to pick between the two, perhaps with just another keyboard shortcut.
- Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, how about using the standard system ones that every other app uses? There aren’t too many offenders here, but there are enough to be annoying. For example, I instinctively press Command-T to bring up the font and text size palette. In Notebook Layout (and all of Word), Command-D does this. So when I press Command-T, I ended up changing the tab location. That’s annoying.
- Obviously there are design decisions to be made regarding how much “unique” functionality you want your application to have, as opposed to using “for free” functionality provided by the system frameworks (or, of course, user interface guidelines). I would differ from the MacBU team on the idea of the built-in spell-checker and dictionary, for example. Why not use the system functionality here? As for the former, I wouldn’t have to add my unwieldy surname to both the system dictionary and the Word one. As for the latter, it just seems redundant. Instead of having the Office team spending hour upon hour of development time reinventing the wheel, why not direct that time into something more useful, such as getting an Intel-compatible version of the application suite out within two years of the architecture’s public introduction?
- I’ll combine two complaints into one here, since they both relate to the tabs, or “Sections” on the right side of the Notebook Layout screen. Basically, they’re forgetful. There are two annoying behaviors that I deal with every single day. I have a tab for every week of class, just because it is an easy way for me to do a week-by-week review. So, let’s say I’m typing some notes in the week 6 tab. My professor asks about something related to default vs. immutable rules. I don’t remember what they are, so I do a search for the term, and the application highlghts the relevant text in my week 2 tab. So far, so good. Then I switch back to the section 6 tab, and I’m disappointed to see that I’m now looking at the top of the file, not where I was typing before. It lost my place. And I have to spend precious time trying to figure out where I was typing before, and praying that I don’t get called on, because I haven’t been paying attention for the last two minutes. So, cursor position is not saved between tab switches. Also, neither the cursor position nor the currently-selected tab is saved when the file is closed. When you open your notebook file, you are always taken to the very top of the first tab. I would argue that a more convenient result would be to be taken wherever you were last working. When you open a real notebook, you don’t turn to page one, then turn to wherever it is you were writing - you (try) to open right to where it is you want to continue writing.
- All I can say about the tables function in the notebook view is that something funky is up with it. It doesn’t work right.
- If you want to know whether or not you are in the “bold” text formatting mode, you need to have the Formatting Palette open. There is no formatting toolbar in the Notebook Layout. What a ridiculous waste of space. Because I can’t see my text at the size I would like to while at the same time having the Palette open, I’m forced to guess whether or not the next word I type will be bold or not. There is no visual indicator as there would be with a toolbar.
I don’t think any of these things would be terribly hard to fix, and they would save me a ton of frustration. So git-r-done.
Because everybody keeps asking (not true), here are my thoughts on Studio 60 that I shared with beejpost:
I really want to like it, but I think Sorkin has failed to expand his portfolio here. It’s just a mash-up of WW and SportsNight, but even more touchy-feely; I’m not ready to really care about these characters yet. There’s no built-in gravitas like there is with people working in the White House. And I feel like WW could deal in one episode with the whole range of issues (censorship, religious right, etc.) that S60 will be relying on for its entire existence.
BJ also added that Bradley Whitford’s character should be named Josh. Truer words have never been spoken.