Betalogue

John Gruber has just posted a link to my recent post about styles in Pages ’09 and in Word 2008. This has inevitably caused a spike in traffic and linkage activity, for which I am grateful. (I should note that I am using WordPress for this site, and so far I have been fortunate enough not to have had my site brought down by such spikes in activity. Let’s hope it continues!)

It has also, somewhat predictably, prompted Microsoft’s Rick Schaut to post a response of sorts on his own blog. (Rick Schaut does not respond directly to my post. Even though he does not say it, he responds to John Gruber’s posting of a link to my post. He’d be very happy and very silent if John Gruber never posted links to my posts.)

I frankly have better things to do than try and address Rick Schaut’s post item by item. It’s Sunday, the sun is shining, we have guests coming for supper, and simply thinking about companies like Microsoft and Adobe these days makes my stomach all tensed up. I just don’t need the aggravation.

That said, if you are interested in getting a sense of how warped the minds of the people behind the design and engineering of Microsoft’s products for the Mac are, his post is a fairly insightful read. In all honesty, most of the time, I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about.

My post was about very simple things, such as the fact that Word is incapable of displaying the current character style and the current paragraph style at the same time. Or that Word is incapable of displaying the current styles of a mixed selection (i.e. a selection consisting of two or more paragraphs formatted using two or more different paragraph styles, or two or more words formatted using two or more different character styles).

His post is about… I don’t know, really. Something about reviewing the structure of a document. Or the fact that, “with Pages, the user is still saddled with having to scan a list of styles in order to see which ones are applied.”

Shocking! With Word 2008, the user is saddled with… not being able to see which styles are applied at all. That is undoubtedly much better.

And, oh yes, with Word 2011, everything will be perfect. Wait for it.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Sunday, May 30th, 2010 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.