Friday 15 December 2017

Microsoft Word 2016 "RANT" [Zoom disabled if Page Movement is set to Side-To-Side] nothing to do with Wargaming .. other than a War on Stupidity!

Update: For a Wargaming Blog this Post is getting an embarrassingly high number of hits (as in people reading it). Methinks they are not the "usual group" of readers. Apologies to those non-wargamings who then decide to prowl around the blog for other useful "IT Tips" and instead bump into Caesar (Life Tip: "Divide and Conquer"), Leonidas ("Molon labe" = Come and get them!) and Marlborough (beloved Corporal John to his troops and "the [only?] Unbeaten Captain)!

Arrrgh!:
I would simply like to state that I would like to get my tiny little hands on the Microsoft Product Owner who championed this new "charming" feature in Word 2016.

FYI: A Word document now has two modes of "Page Movement" Vertical (as the world safely once was) and the new improved "Side-To-Side" (aka the secret new way of disabling the useful "Zoom" function in your document). May I thank that said Product Owner for wasting precious hours of my life in total screen discomfort and utter bemusement, until I Googled [not Bing'ed] the answer (see below):


More "bug" information at:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_word-mso_win10/zoom-function-not-working-in-word-2016-print/1e3d4ed9-70fe-40a6-baaf-328be992c734

Apologies for this uninteresting diatribe to my fellow wargamers :(

Normal service will be resumed once I gather up the spilled paint pots and model soldier that are scattered around the room!

4 comments:

Simon said...

I often feel frustrated now with Microsoft products. Why do they insist on making everything ten times harder than it should be?

Geordie an Exiled FoG said...

Amen brother!

No I don't have an answer other than it is the pain of short-term cheap (but costs you in the long run) design of incremental add on's in place of well thought through UX. They cover over the cracks because it is viewed as too costly to go deep into the product and fix it correctly.

My views only .. IMHO ;)

PatG said...

I work with MS products everyday. Frustrating doesn't begin to cover it thank the gods for Google.

Office is one of the major reasons I use Linux at home. :)

Geordie an Exiled FoG said...

Pat, I honestly think MS does not know who uses their products for what so rather than make the end process better they cram their products with features and hope for the best. The old 20/80 rule applies. 20% of the common features are what 80% of their users need. By trying to be clever with the "80% of features people really don't use" they end up screwing about with the "valuable 20%" of features people need. Versioning (mine being 2016) changes are where the pain bites first.

:(

Back to wargaming!