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Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

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Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#171

Post by chapium »

egdod wrote: post #128
cosmodisk wrote: post #118

I started using windows about 25 years ago.It was 3.1 and now my Dell XPS runs on Win 10 and my job is technical. Despite all of this,with every additional release they somewhat manage to make it less and less intuitive and more difficult. There's no logic in so many design decisions- it's mad. Anyone,who's never used a computer doesn't stand a chance nowadays.

Windows 7 was pretty good. Windows 10 is a mess.

I found the transition from 7 to 10 pretty seamless. The only thing I don't like is the alt tab screen, but the original was pretty bad anyway.

Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#172

Post by connicpu »

whoopdedo wrote: post #151
simcop2387 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the best "feature" that windows 95 had to me as a kid. If you clicked the start menu, then hit alt + -, you'd get the standard menu for playing with a window. Minimize, Maximize, Move (greyed out), and a few others. Importantly though was that Close was an option. Clicking it would remove the start button. This lead to lots of fun playing with computers in stores at the time, closing the start butt…

I never stumbled into that one. What I do remember from Windows 95b through 7 is if the keyboard focus was on the taskbar and you pressed Alt+F4, it brought up the Shutdown/Restart/Logoff dialog. That made it possible to cleanly shutdown the computer blindly from the keyboard. Win,Esc,Alt+F4,R,Enter

That's still a thing, the focus just needs to be on the desktop!

Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#174

Post by Nition »

benmorris wrote: post #163

Windows has become a complete UI disaster. I feel like Windows 7 was the last cohesive UI. The control panel is a great example. I'm not sure how it could possibly be more of a train wreck. Settings are in seemingly random locations split between the new and old style control panels. The deeper you get into dialogs it is like stepping back in time. Printers or network adapters you end up jumping back and forth to fin…

If anyone hasn't really noticed this, a good example is try changing the mouse pointer speed (which is surely a pretty common thing to want to do!).

Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#175

Post by Nition »

y2bd wrote: post #124
brianpgordon wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it in a weird place though? Notepad has been under Start -> Accessories since the debut of the start menu in Windows 95. The only change is naming the folder Windows Accessories instead of Accessories.

Seems like a pretty big change to me. Not only has the folder name changed with no indicator that it has changed, but now since it's "W" instead of "A", it's near the bottom instead of at the very top. Plus, Windows 10 now has /way/ more pre-installed applications, which means you have to do a lot of scrolling before you get all the way to the "W" section.

If you even realise you can scroll! Without using a mouse wheel, there's just that tiny thin black scrollbar.

Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#176

Post by dan-robertson »

com2kid wrote: post #96
wiseleo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office 2007 ribbon was a terrible release. I am an Office power user and I still have to dig through well hidden “advanced” dialog boxes that were previously exposed in the UI to do things that I remember Office was capable of doing. I still hate that change.

> I still have to dig through well hidden “advanced” dialog boxes that were previously exposed in the UI to do things that I remember Office was capable of doing. The search button in Office apps is super useful. Type in a vague suggestion of what you want and it'll pop up a button for the appropriate feature! The ribbon is very nice for some things. It is meh for others. In Excel I'd argue it was a dramatic improvem…

The search feature is a good improvement. You see it used to various degrees in other complicated programs with lots of features (eg emacs, blender, even jira). It’s good because it can make things better for people looking for a function they don’t know and for advanced users looking for something they do know. And it provides a good intermediate level of speed between digging through menus and knowing the keyboard shortcut.

On the other hand, the built in help system before 2007 or so worked out pretty well (maybe it was slightly dying by 2003. I remember the vba help worked well and maybe the rest didn’t work so well), whereas the help system in 2007 was completely awful and I think it was getting worse. I haven’t used office recently enough to know if they ever fixed it or if it was just replaced by incomplete documentation, google searches, and obscure forums.

Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#177

Post by markmark »

Nition wrote: post #174
benmorris wrote: post #163

Windows has become a complete UI disaster. I feel like Windows 7 was the last cohesive UI. The control panel is a great example. I'm not sure how it could possibly be more of a train wreck. Settings are in seemingly random locations split between the new and old style control panels. The deeper you get into dialogs it is like stepping back in time. Printers or network adapters you end up jumping back and forth to fin…

If anyone hasn't really noticed this, a good example is try changing the mouse pointer speed (which is surely a pretty common thing to want to do!).

I'm on mac, but opened up my windows laptop to check this. I clicked the start menu, typed "mouse speed" and the first option was "Change the mouse pointer display or speed", I picked that and there I was.

Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#178

Post by tachyonbeam »

DannyB2 wrote: post #52

Fifteen years ago, one of the Microsoft fanboy arguments against both Linux and LibreOffice (then OpenOffice.org) was that neither worked exactly like Windows / Office. Then Microsoft comes along and changes everything. The Ribbon instead of the pull down menus. Now which office suite works more like what users have used for a couple decades? Windows 8 comes along with a totally different UI. So different that ordina…

After not having used Windows for a couple of years, I installed Windows 8 on my old computer before giving said computer to my mom. Out of the box, Windows update was broken. Known bug, the fix for it was to download a patch, and the said patch, after being downloaded could only be installed with network access disabled (???). What garbage. How did Windows update ship broken out of the box? How did this pass quality control? I don't know how anyone can trust Microsoft and let themselves get sucked into their vendor lock-in.

Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#179

Post by wiseleo »

SL61 wrote: post #147
wiseleo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office 2007 ribbon was a terrible release. I am an Office power user and I still have to dig through well hidden “advanced” dialog boxes that were previously exposed in the UI to do things that I remember Office was capable of doing. I still hate that change.

This really shows the power of habit. Now that it's been 12 years, a whole generation has grown up with the ribbon UI. At 22, I'm one of them. Office 2003 and earlier (+ LibreOffice) feels clunky and arcane to me. 2007 was the first Office version that I seriously used, and I remember being confused as to why my parents complained about the ribbon. Sometimes I wonder if UI design matters at all beyond what users are…

It goes beyond habits. I know what Office was capable of many years ago. Many of those features became completely hidden by the ribbon. Once I managed to find them again, I would be looking at the unchanged dialog boxes from Office 97 inside the pretty Ribbon interface.

Let me put it this way - I am qualified to write a book about Microsoft Outlook. One of my presentation interaction points when talking about Outlook was to tell the person asking the question "This was already a feature introduced in Outlook __".

Outlook got especially destroyed by Ribbon. It is capable of so much more than is exposed by the UI. The same is true for Excel, especially once you add various add-ons.

Ribbon made it easier for novices to learn a handful of shortcuts using multiple key strokes (press alt and follow the letters that appear). It also destroyed workflows of countless power users.

Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#180

Post by wiseleo »

com2kid wrote: post #96
wiseleo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office 2007 ribbon was a terrible release. I am an Office power user and I still have to dig through well hidden “advanced” dialog boxes that were previously exposed in the UI to do things that I remember Office was capable of doing. I still hate that change.

> I still have to dig through well hidden “advanced” dialog boxes that were previously exposed in the UI to do things that I remember Office was capable of doing. The search button in Office apps is super useful. Type in a vague suggestion of what you want and it'll pop up a button for the appropriate feature! The ribbon is very nice for some things. It is meh for others. In Excel I'd argue it was a dramatic improvem…

Office can do many things that I wouldn't be able to even begin to describe as a search query. They are all well-hidden. Dig a little under the facade and look at the VBA methods. Most of that functionality is or was available somewhere in the UI.
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