Re: Work Menu - Word:mac 2008

Hi Aliquis:

Oh, he was having a go at me. It gives him a purpose in life :-)

Clive is ordinarily a perfect gentleman. I am the only one he would ever
contradict :-)

I suspect that one of the reasons they want to get rid of the Work menu is
that it can contain "only" Word Documents. The other mechanisms can contain
"anything".

Microsoft Office has come full circle in XML. In the beginning, one
application created a file that could either be printed as a document or
displayed as a presentation, and might contain numbers than add up.

Then the software industry split them into four different applications so
they could make it look like there was more in the box when you bought the
software. And so they could outrageously inflate their margin if you
decided to buy only "some" of the applications.

But increasingly, behind the scenes, it's all one engine. All one user
interface. With a .plist to tell it how to display itself. And now the
file format is also the same, with a cascading style *** to tell the
application how to display the content.

So why not begin the process of rolling the applications all back together
again :-) Of course, Marketing will insist on pretending there is a
"difference" for some time to come. But increasingly the "Developers" and
"Designers" are working on "Features" that will appear in several places :-)

Cheers


On 9/3/08 10:58 AM, in article ee8940f.50@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "aliquis"
<aliquis@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

However, I am one of many professional users of Word on the Mac who strongly
disagree with you that the Work menu is an anachronism.

Hi Clive,

Not sure whether you're addressing John or me, since I was paraphrasing John
when I wrote what you quoted from my post.

At a practical level the Recent items feature can display up to 99 recent
documents (you can alter the number in the general preferences), not just 9.
You can also use the Customise Toolbars and Menus command to make it a drop
down Menu on the Menu bar in place of or next to the Work Menu, instead of
having it tucked away on the File Menu. And you can even add the Remove Menu
Item to remove recent items (remember it's not a 'Remove Item from Work Menu'
command ? it will remove anything from any menu: that was my original
complaint.)

The Work Menu itself can hold more than 9 items too. Not sure what the limit
is or if there is one. I understand why you might not want to use the Dock,
but then there is always the Sidebar on the Finder window too where you can
lodge documents whose titles you can read, rather than just see their icons.

John can speak for himself of course, but I understand his point about
archaism to be not about the Work Menu as such, and hence not about having
access to favourites, but about Menu driven software in general.

--
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Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:john@xxxxxxxxxxx

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