Upgrade Hell

I have avoided writing or blogging about the "upgrades" to MS Office products out of fear. Fear that I would go too far, that I would sound, well, profane. Now, thanks to this brilliant writer and her WSJ article, I can finally unmuzzle myself and shake my fist at Microsoft. I am sure that some lives have been ruined, laid waste by these "improvements."

Here's an excerpt:
"Upgrades are rarely better or easier. In the previous version of Word, if you wanted to do something simple like use bold face or italics or perhaps center a paragraph, the options stretched across the top of your screen in a friendly here-I-am-click-on-me-kind-of-way.

In the current version, everything is hidden. One is helpless in the face of technology marching needlessly on. Where is bold face? Italics? Hello? After endless searching—and it is risky to click on anything unknown on a computer because you can end up in a cyber world you can't escape from . . . then you will have to call tech support and that will surely wreck your day—after clicking willy-nilly, I found, under VIEW, something called "Formatting Palette." Palette? I'm not a painter but hey, I clicked on it and up popped a small box with all the options—bf, ital, font size, etc.—crammed into it. I practically needed a magnifying glass to use it. And would I remember where it was when I needed it next?"
Delia Ephron: Upgrade Hell - WSJ.com:

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