I don’t get it. I just upgraded my edition of Microsoft Office, which I still use only because of Publisher for which, so far, there is no really good alternative, unless you go into the high-dollar range. Open Office and Libre Office are great alternatives to all the rest of it, but Publisher… there is a nice program being worked on but it’s not quite as mature as I need it to be yet. As soon as it’s ready to go I will be dropping MSFT Office altogether.
Why? Like I started to say: I don’t get it. How can Microsoft mange to keep thr same bugs in the Office products for decades… without fixing them? I can point to specific bugs that have been there for over 20 years and still have not been addressed. After so long, my fingers know how to work around them, (some of them; some of them still get me) and that’s just plain silly.
I don’t need new features. I need all the existing features made bullet-proof and I need the productivity pathway straightened out. THEN worry about adding some new ones, a whole bundle of which I could suggest, things that *seem* obvious but I’ve been waiting a very long time for.
“Bullet proof” is probably self-explanatory: if not, I mean simply I want the software to do exactly and precisely what it is supposed to do: nothing more, nothing less, and always do it right [Publisher has a spooky habit of doing unpredictable things, I never quite know what it’s going to do at any given time; it’s behavior changes] — right now it only mostly does that, and some of it looks like it was engineered by summer interns rather than seasoned pros.
What do I mean by productivity pathway? It’s not the usual phrase, but I mean that Publisher is a clunky, tedious thing to use where it could have been wondrously streamlined, simple, easy and FAST to use.
You see, I have also upgraded my workstation to a faster processor and to a far better video card, hoping against hope that would speed up Publisher. Amazingly, it did not. Publisher is still annoyingly slow, and the design flaws, of course, would not be fixed by that anyway; still, I was hoping for some relief.
I suspect the underlying problem (besides the fundamental flaws in the basic design and layout) is in Microsoft’s framework (called .NET [pronounced “dot net’]) and that the programming teams that work on Office are not allowed to fix or streamline any code inside .NET. That framework is going to be the death of Microsoft if they don’t start assigning some programmers (like, a bundle of them) to streamlining it, making it run fast. It’s a pig, right now, to be blunt about it. (No insult to actual Pigs — Sus scrofa domesticus, especially — intended.)
When I upgraded from Office 2007 to 2017 (back in 2017) it was out of desperation. I thought, “10 years; they must have some of those bugs fixed, surely this is an improved package now.” Imagine my disappointment when they weren’t and it wasn’t. In fact, several new bugs and flaws had been introduced. A couple nifty new features, but those don’t make up for the lack of professionalism, ultimately.
I just upgraded (along with the “new” workstation) from Office 2017 to Office 2019. The only differences I can find are that misformattings in the documents I crafted in 2017. That is the 2019 version of Publisher moved from things around. I’d call that a New Bug, and, in fact, a pretty serious one. Oh, and the save button’s location has been changed. Beyond that, I haven’t yet noticed what’s new, if anything.
Why does Microsoft’s stock keep going up? I can only speculate that those who invest in it are not programmers. Wouldn’t it be interesting to get a demographic on that: what companies do long time / senior programmers hold stock in?
I have a suggestion: everybody who works on Office at Microsoft should first spend 3 months doing nothing but working with the open source package known as Blender. It’s a 3D modelling tool, so is not related to anything Office does, but it is STREAMLINED and PRODUCTION ORIENTED and is the finest example I know of for those qualities. And it’s FREE! (Go figure that one out, would you?) After having worked over and over with such a package, the programmers and designers behind Office could not help but make their package far better. They’d instantly see everything (well, most things at least) wrong with the User Interface and its performance; how clunky and amateurish it really is.
Office was released a great many years ago. It really ought to be perfect by now. Perfect. (So should windows be perfect by now. Alas…) There should be nothing more to do to it, by and large. Yet, it is so far from perfect that I shudder.
NOTE: When I say Office I mean the whole suite: word, publisher, excel, etc, and that means Microsoft Office, which is not the only such “office tools suite” out there.
NOTE: Just for reference, I am a programmer (among other things), and have been for over 40 years.