Office 2003 Beta 2

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
March 10th, 2003 • 11:28 pm

PC Mag reviews the latest beta of Office 2003 for Windows:

You can breathe a sigh of relief at the news that no new file formats are added. Unfortunately, Microsoft still hasn’t provided consistent keyboard shortcuts throughout the suite, so expert users who use F8 to extend a selection in Word and Excel will be annoyed to see the same key open an Accessibility dialog in FrontPage and do nothing at all in PowerPoint and Publisher.

Nothing new under the sun, then.

Fancy, trendy XML-based features won’t hide the fact that Microsoft can’t even get the fundamentals of user interface right.

Think things are better on the Mac side of things?

Try using the “same” AutoCorrect feature in Word X, Excel X and PowerPoint X.

Try formatting paragraphs of text in PowerPoint X.

Try changing the format of an automatic page number in Word X.

Try inserting an endnote in a Word X document if you don’t know that, in Microsoft parlance, “endnotes” are a subset of “footnotes” and are actually accessed through the “Insert>Footnote…” command.

Try deleting an existing bookmark in a Word X without going through the “Insert” menu. (You don’t want to INSERT a new bookmark. You want to DELETE an existing one.)

Etc. etc.

Can’t wait to see what fancy “improvements” the MacBU at Microsoft has in store for us in the next Mac version of Office…


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