Working with MS Word 2007

I would think that, by now, new versions of MS Office would get easier to use. It's hard to think of how much more functionality they could possibly push into the tools that they offer.

However, my experiences with MS Office 2007 have been FRUSTRATING and changes don't make sense to me.

The new ribbon, what the hell? The categories and where they've placed different functionality on those ribbons is NOT intuitive. I usually have to look through multiple ribbons before I find what I want, sometimes not finding it at all. I don't know how many times I've resorted to searching on Google to find out how to do something, or that something isn't supported with Office 2007.

Updateable field codes in Word 2007 for things like "Page 4 of 8" in footers, and inserting document titles, or the last saved date, or the last saved by information, is a great idea. And they do appear to have this functionality available. But it doesn't work like it should.
I can't figure out how to have a document update those fields automatically when you save it, or open it. You have to either go to "print preview", or right click on each field individually and choose "update field", or hit Ctrl-A to select all and then hit F9. WTF?

How come I can't apply a document template to an existing document?

When you set-up your headers and footers to be different for the first page than for the rest, how do you actually edit the headers and footers for page 2+ if you don't have content that spans to the 2nd page yet? Is the official way really just to hit "enter" enough times to create a new page, and then edit it? That's unacceptable.

Why can't I edit a read-only document, even if I don't plan on saving it? Maybe I want to just put a note in there, or move something around just to see how it looks, but not save it, because it's not checked-out to me yet from a SharePoint 2007 document library? (SharePoint is an entire other list of frustrations of the way things SHOULD be.)

Here's a link to a blog with many Word 2007 shortcomings, and oftentimes helpful work arounds that may not be obvious.
http://word2007bible.herbtyson.com/category/computing/word-2007/

Here's a blog detailing the how and why of the ribbon.
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/

My Toshiba Tecra M4: Rants, and Raves, and more Rants...

A couple of years ago I purchased a new Toshiba Tecra M4 Table PC. It seemed to be the best option available for what I was looking for in a laptop/tablet PC.

Several of the things that influenced my decision:

• The screen is nice and big, with a nice crisp native resolution of 1400x1050.
• The keyboard layout makes more sense to me than all the other brands. However, there's still a couple of shortcomings about the keyboard I'd have designed differently.
• Pro: Home-PgUp-PgDn-End keys are perfectly located in column on right end of keyboard
• Con: Why did they put the Windows key and the right-click keys way up in the corner? Normally these are around the Alt and Ctrl and spacebar keys. I miss being able to use "Winkey - M" to minimize all windows. Or "Winkey - R" to open the run dialog. Or being able to just hit the "right-click" key to get the context menu to pop up, instead of having to use the right-mouse button.
  
• Pro: Has both the touchpad, as well as the eraser-head mouse thing. And the touchpad can be totally configured for lots of different actions (like right-side scrolling, or scroll and hold to continue scrolling).
  
• Con: What the hell is the tilda/reverse apostrophy key doing between the space bar and the Alt key? I'm a big "alt-tab" person, in order to switch quickly between apps. But I was constantly hitting tilda-tab, which isn't anything but annoying. I found a fix by remapping the tilda key to "LeftAlt", using a program I found at randyrants.com, called SharpKeys. So it doesn't matter if I miss the Alt key and hit the tilda, it still acts like Alt. The only drawback there is I can't type a tilda, but I've never really needed to, until now, as I'm talking about not being able to. I've been able to re-map a couple of other things: Swapped CapsLock with WinKey. Swapped "INS" with "RightClick". In my opinion, this is the way it should've been in the first place.
• Pro: When on a plane, I can put my laptop on the seat-tray, flipped around backwards so everything fits between me and the seat in front of me, with the screen angled away. Granted, I can't use the keyboard in this configuration, so I use it as a tablet with the pen. Mostly I'm just watching movies anyway

I've had times where I totally enjoyed it, and PLENTY of times where I've found myself researching online trying to find fixes for various

PEN NOT WORKING

Finding a slimbay battery.

Finding and installing the Bluetooth.

BLOATWARE

Removing the "buy at Toshiba" crap.

Installing a fresh install of Tablet PC.

Pro: Has SD card-reader built in.
Pro: Reading full-screen magazines via Zinio Reader or PDFs.

SPEAKERS RATTLE

DIRT UNDER SCREEN

Naturally runs hot. Notebook Hardware Control is a remedy.

There seems to be a bit of lagginess when it comes to responsiveness sometimes.

Of all the blogs of all the world...

Of all the blogs of all the world, it's been at least one blog shy of complete, according to me.


Therefore, this might be the one that finally makes sense of it all, at least for me.


My overall theme for discussion here? Everything.

Well, at least everything that's of interest to me.
So, here's to everything, and to everything, here's ME!!