Microsoft Word’s Baroque era
For those of us working primarily on the Web, Microsoft Word’s various “Smart” features (smart quotes, auto correct, auto format, etc.) have always been hydras whose heads one had to repeatedly lop off. Even if you didn’t work in Word yourself, colleagues would submit copy composed in it, and you’d have to deal with the problem of introducing junk characters. Some of us have become reasonably familiar with exactly which boxes and buttons you need to press to “web-safe” a Word installation.
Now Microsoft seems to have grown hip to how frequently we have to tell Word to “stop doing” the things its programmers have spent years enabling it to do. This is from today’s New York Times review by David Pogue of a new version of Microsoft Office for Mac:
| Smart Buttons, descended from a similar feature in Word for Windows, are tiny pop-up menus that appear in your text whenever Word has something to offer you. For example, one appears whenever Word auto-formats something you’ve typed (a chronic sore spot with Microsoft customers): turning a Web address into a difficult-to-edit Web link, for example, or automatically numbering a list. You’ve always been able to turn off these intrusions in a dialog box or undo individual changes by pressing Command-Z. But Smart Tags put “Undo” and “Stop doing this” commands right in front of you where you can’t miss them. |
I broke out laughing when I read this. Consider the baroque logic: Microsoft has now reached that rarefied state of software existence in which it can offer “improvements” in the form of new features that make it easier to turn off those annoying “improvements” of yesteryear that were hitherto too difficult to discard!
But how deep within Word’s menus must one hunt to turn off “Smart Buttons” if they get annoying? And is anyone at Microsoft going to flip the page of the newspaper section in which Pogue’s review appears and read “A Design Epiphany: Keep It Simple”?
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September 26th, 2006 at 11:16 am
Amen Brother. BTW, any idea how to turn off the “Smart (stupid) Buttons” yet?
September 26th, 2006 at 11:34 am
Ok, I think I got it. First of all “Help” is no help.
Goto preferences: Error Checking: Then deselect the Rule that is annoying you. If you are uncertain, you can deselect “enable background error checking” altogether or experiment with deselecting the “rules” one at a time and note which one does the trick.
A note to technology designers: Anytime you feel the urge to name a design feature with the preface “Smart”, know that you are assuming that you can read the end user’s mind. And you know what happens when you assume…