borged...

Installed the Spawn of Redmond on my home machine earlier this week. I loathe Word with a fiery passion, and have no intention of using it at home other than for dealing with files from people who believe that Word Is The One True Way, but as both the day job and the writing now involve ever more frequent encounters with people who are not even aware that there exist other word processors, I don't much have choice about having it available for use, even if it's not what I use day to day. (I have nothing against Excel, but also no reason to change over from 1-2-3.)

Of course, what I've installed is 2007, since that's what there was a spare licence for lying around in this household -- and I use 2003 at work. So that's yet another set of menus to learn, then...

ETA: Please do not suggest that I download Open Office. Open Office is not reliably compatible with the group working functions in Word which are the reason for me installing the damn thing in the first place, and is all too compatible with Word in the areas which are the reason I hate having to use Word.

my eyes, my eyes!

So I've just fired up Word 2007. It appears to be infested with the ribbon. And when I go to microsoft.com, I find

There is no way to delete or replace the Ribbon with the toolbars and menus from the earlier versions of Microsoft Office.

.

Yes, Dragon has natural speech commands that can bypass the menus, but my current machine isn't powerful enough to run that part of Dragon. Time to go hunting for the accessibility stuff on ms.com. :-(

(this may go some way to explaining why the day job is still on 2003.)