Microsoft Word 2008

Word 2008, for Macintosh, isn't out yet but will be later this year:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/jan07/01-09MacworldPR.mspx

Like Word 2007 for Windows, it will feature the Ribbon interface, with all of the drawbacks I discussed in the previous newsletter:

http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1720752173

But there's one more drawback that will be utterly devastating: No more recording, programming, or even running of macros. In other words, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) will *not* be part of Word 2008. Here's the explanation given by one of the developers:

http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/08/saying-goodbye-to-visual-basic/

Since I make a living writing Word add-ins, I'm unhappy about this, and I'm not alone:

http://www.macworld.com/2006/12/opinion/microsoft/

Power users--editors, typesetters, indexers, and other publishing professionals--are just out of luck on this one.

Solutions?

NeoOffice 2.1 is slated to support VBA:

http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=116

And VBA support is being developed for OpenOffice.org Writer--a very big deal:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/VBA

http://www.openoffice.org/

You could also do what I'm going to do: Stick with Word 2004.

If you have other solutions, I'd love to hear about them:

mailto:editor [at symbol] editorium.com

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READERS WRITE

After reading the last newsletter, India Amos (http://indiamos.wordpress.com/) wrote:

Thank you so much for writing this review. As soon as I saw Walter Mossberg's article, I was worried that the new version of Word would break ETK+.

So, it makes sense to me that integrated *programs* such as FileCleaner, NoteStripper, and QuarkConverter would continue to work with Word 2007 (phew!), but what will happen to all the specialized toolbars, if the new Word has no toolbars? I rely heavily on the FileCleaner buttons. Will I finally have to learn the keyboard shortcuts if I upgrade, or will there be still some buttony interface?

I responded:

They'll still be there, but only in the "Add-ins" section of the ribbon. And they can't be moved around, either. So you'll still be able to use the buttons, but you won't be able to move the toolbars anywhere else.

You'll find some screenshots of the Ribbon interface here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101679411033.aspx

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA100898951033.aspx

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Rohn from Winnipeg wrote:

I feel your pain/pane with the "New & Improved" Office 2007 Ribbon UI. I haven't had a chance to try it myself, but what I've seen in demonstrations etc, doesn't impress me. I just came across this blog:

http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/10/09/58

It has a few dozen links (literally!) detailing the design of the UI by someone who worked on it.

The few links I've read so far have been interesting and informative. One of them describes why they limited customization, only approximately 1% of all users do any significant amount of customization (and he mentioned that it represents something like 130 million individuals!)

Another "interesting" site is some more M$ propaganda in Comic form promoting the Ribbon UI:

http://www.enchantedoffice.com/default.asp

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Susan Daffron (http://www.logicalexpressions.com) wrote:

At the risk of sounding like a "me too," I completely agreed with your analysis of what's wrong with the tack Microsoft is taking with Word.

>This combination of making the interface more and more generic and

customization more and more difficult has, in my opinion, finally

resulted in a version of Word (2007) that is unfit for any but two sets

of users: the most basic, and the most advanced (programmers).<<

In fact, I'd venture to say that they are making this mistake with almost ALL their products.

Our company develops software and my husband is a programmer. Microsoft's development tools on the one hand have all these "ease of use" features built in now, yet have become SO complicated that trying to build a simple application is no longer simple.

In my case, like you I've been writing about Word for a long time now (although at a much lower level; my articles are generally for frustrated newbies). But I'm at the point where I want to completely stop. My favorite version of Word is 2000. (I almost never even open 2003 if I can help it.) The Task Pane was awful enough; I want to get off the bus.

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Expert word-whacker Hilary Powers is writing--and will, in a few months, be publishing--a book on editing in Microsoft Word. The title? "Making Word Work for You: An Editor's Intro to the Tool of the Trade." Personally, I can hardly wait. I'll announce the book's publication with great gusto as soon as it becomes available, so stay tuned.

Hilary Powers (http://www.powersedit.com) wrote:

If you still have Word 2003 available, you can make Word 2007 give you most of the old interface. Here's a sneak preview from "Making Word Work for You: An Editor's Intro to the Tool of the Trade," due out soon from the Editorial Freelancers Association:

The next PC release, Word 2007, has--what joy--a completely different interface, sans menus, with (as of this writing) no company plan to make the old display available. To get around this, Cindy Meister, a Microsoft MVP, suggests taking the time in your pre-2007 copy of Word to create a menu template. . . . What you do is go to Tools, Customize and create a new toolbar, saving it in this template. Press Ctrl and drag each Word menu (File, Edit, Insert, and the rest, including any custom menus you've created) into the toolbar and save it. When the dread day comes, copy the menu template to your Word 2007 machine and list it with the add-ins, using whatever procedure that system turns out to require. All your Word menus, more or less as you know them now, should appear. Cindy adds, "Of course, no guarantees that all of them will work just like what you're used to. As of beta 2: Some things do map to the new interface; some don't have any effect at all. But most appear to continue to access current (Word 2003) interfaces." It's not a disaster; comments from beta testers indicate that most macros and add-ins continue to work properly in the new environment, and the new user interface has much to recommend it. Me, I'll probably upgrade eventually--but I'll give it at least a year or two to settle down first.

Many thanks to India, Rohn, Susan, and Hilary.

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RESOURCES

ReferenceChecker checks numerical (Vancouver) and name+date-style (Harvard and APA) references in Word files. The website contains a download section where users can obtain a free, fully functional trial version:

http://www.goodcitations.com