31–40 of 160 posts
I can't think of anything in my office usage that wasn't available in 2000. Admittedly I've not used Outlook for a fair few years. I still pay £30 or so a year for the annual licence when it comes on sale just to be able to open docs natively though!
- pre emptive auto fill based on context
- sparklines (tiny graph in a cell)
- cute conditional formatting UI
- some web data fetching can be of use if your sheet is dealing with external / world data
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Office will use whatever fonts you have installed. Calibri is already dated, it hasn’t aged too well.
> Calibri is already dated, it hasn’t aged too well. I think it looks great. Maybe I'm dated! It's certainly a lot better than Arial, which proceeded it, and I don't commonly come across something that's so much better that I wished I wasn't using Calibri. Did you have something specific in mind? The primary serif font, Cambria, is fine but I much prefer Palatino (which was originally released more than 70 years ago…
My only problem is the fact that it has difficulties opening docx and xlsx and it can't save them at all, so sometimes I may have problems exchanging docs with colleagues. But that's a small price to pay for its stability, speed and how much light weight it is! Also, it has no real copy protection! If you've got a serial you can install it to all your machines!
I'm actually still using office 2000 at work. All my documents and sheets are generated with it (and I use it a lot to generate various bureocratic stuff). My only problem is the fact that it has difficulties opening docx and xlsx and it can't save them at all, so sometimes I may have problems exchanging docs with colleagues. But that's a small price to pay for its stability, speed and how much light weight it is! Al…
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> Calibri is already dated, it hasn’t aged too well. I think it looks great. Maybe I'm dated! It's certainly a lot better than Arial, which proceeded it, and I don't commonly come across something that's so much better that I wished I wasn't using Calibri. Did you have something specific in mind? The primary serif font, Cambria, is fine but I much prefer Palatino (which was originally released more than 70 years ago…
I love Palatino, Garamond, and other timeless fonts. I just don’t think Calibri is timeless at all. Calibri actually wasn’t preceded by Arial; it was a replacement for Times New Roman, which was the previous default font in Microsoft Word. (They made the switch from Serif to Sans Serif.) Arial - apart from being the default font in Notepad and WordPad - was never really part of the Windows aesthetic. The new Windows…
I think Calibri looks extremely readable on screen (at least on Windows with ClearType, which is what it was designed for). At the end of the day it's a matter of opinion.
Your article on Tahoma and Verdana was very interesting! To veer a little further off topic: I was under the impression that those fonts, or at least Verdana, was primary designed for great readibility for very short text labels in dialogue boxes, so it does make me wince when I see them used for long documents, especially printed ones.
I believe some around 2000 Office and Windows reached their peaks of usability. They seemed to designed to get stuff done. Since then it seems they crammed more and more "intelligent" functions into the software that made them less predictable. I still don't know under what circumstances Windows Search finds things sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. Lately Outlook search feels random. Teams search is a complete mess…
The extra clicks every time you try to save anything in newer versions of Office before you can get to a file picker dialog is truly maddening.
I believe some around 2000 Office and Windows reached their peaks of usability. They seemed to designed to get stuff done. Since then it seems they crammed more and more "intelligent" functions into the software that made them less predictable. I still don't know under what circumstances Windows Search finds things sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. Lately Outlook search feels random. Teams search is a complete mess…
Win95 had very strict and consistent UI style. Office2k and Win2k were peak of this consistency. After that came WinXP and mismatch of inconsistent UI styles.
Windows 10 never really reached self-consistency in six years, and it seems like Microsoft just doesn't care at this point with Windows 11 now just layering more contradictory concepts on the unfinished Windows 10 ones.
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Reading between the lines of enumerous blog posts, I think him and his yes man were also responsible for torpedoing Longhorn and replacing all .NET ideas with COM. So now we have to "enjoy" that since then all new APIs are COM based. It is going to take decades to undo this, if until then we don't move all into "Azure OS" and it stops being relevant.
Breaking everything now to maybe win in the future is not Microsoft's way. Their way is: Make a new thing, use the old thing to push the new thing.
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I love Palatino, Garamond, and other timeless fonts. I just don’t think Calibri is timeless at all. Calibri actually wasn’t preceded by Arial; it was a replacement for Times New Roman, which was the previous default font in Microsoft Word. (They made the switch from Serif to Sans Serif.) Arial - apart from being the default font in Notepad and WordPad - was never really part of the Windows aesthetic. The new Windows…
I suppose it depends on how you look at it. It used to be that the two main fonts were Arial and Times New Roman (and Courier New), then they switched to Calibri and Cambria (and Consolas). At the same time, as you say, they switched Word's default from serif to sans serif (because sans serif are better for on-screen reading, and the assumption about how documents would be read had changed). I'm sure we can agree on…
[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/sitka
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Breaking everything now to maybe win in the future is not Microsoft's way. Their way is: Make a new thing, use the old thing to push the new thing.
It wasn't their way, nowadays ask anyone burned with XNA, Managed DirectX, Silverlight, C++/CX, WinRT 8, UAP 8.1, UWP, WCF,.... how they feel about Microsoft support.
New thing fails, make a new new thing.
So Managed DirectX was replaced with XNA.
Silverlight was just MSFlash, although it used XAML which is still used today I assume.
C++/CX was replaced with C++/WinRT
WinRT the runtime started the sandboxing and ARM support path.
What's UAP?
UWP is still around, but again, no one cared because HTML5.
And at least WCF is open source, although does anyone use it?
At some point MS realised Windows wasn't important and moved to Azure.