[IxDA Discuss] “The Most Frequently Used Features in Microsoft Office”

[Alexander Baxevanis]

On Feb 20, 2008 6:16 AM, Murli Nagasundaram <murliman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Alexander mentioned the problem of organizing 500+ commands.  The answer is,
> you don't organize it.  Not in the conventional way, anyway.

Well, that was mostly a rhetoric question :) I agree that search is a
good idea in many cases: after installing Launchy
(http://www.launchy.net/) on my Windows machine and Quicksilver
(http://www.blacktree.com/) on my Mac, I have only needed to go back
to my Start Menu/Applications folder to find an app that I don't use
very often and whose name I can't quite remember.

And that is actually one of the issues with search: how can if find
something if you don't know what you want? As somebody mentioned
above, there are people who have been using Word for ages, and would
still create a heading manually by changing font size etc. instead of
using a style. I can't see how search would let them discover commands
that can help them work in a better way.

There are systems like LaTeX that make it much more difficult to
fiddle with fonts/sizes/bold/italic etc. individually and provide very
convenient shortcuts for applying styles. There is also a wealth of
templates/plugin that can really simplify many common workflows. But
when most Word users are faced with such a system, they can't find
they "Bold" button, they scream, and run away :) I wonder what would
take to ensure a smoother transition between these two alternatives?