Betalogue

Talk about a major regression.

Based on my experience running Word 2008 for the past few days, it appears that the application is completely unable to save a document window’s position and restore that position when you close and then reopen the document in question.

In other words, if you work on a document in a document window in a certain position on your screen, and then you close (with saving) and reopen that document, Word moves the document window back to the default location, with the top-left corner of the window in the top-left corner of the screen.

It also completely fails to remember the document window’s size. Each time you close and then reopen a document, its window goes back to the default window size.

Windows users might tolerate their application’s inability to preserve such things, but this is totally unacceptable in a Mac application. (Out of curiosity, I tested things in Word XP under Windows XP and Word XP does not save the document window’s size and position. It just automatically uses the window position and size of the last opened document. But since there is utter confusion between document window and application window in Windows, I think it is just a case of the application itself remember its own application window size and position. Document window positions and sizes are not preserved at all.)

Word 2004 was perfectly able to remember both window position and window size. And, for that matter, Excel 2008 itself is perfectly able to preserve these settings.

So why not Word 2008? How on earth can Microsoft justify such a regression? It is a major loss of functionality that will result in daily frustration for Word users, who will constantly have to readjust their documents’ window sizes and positions.

It is absolutely pathetic.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 9:15 am and is filed under Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.