Office Inconsistencies
Mind numbingly stupid…
Say you’re using Microsft Word, you’ve got two documents open and two windows. And you’ve got two tabs on the.. err.. start bar thing. Clicking between the two switches you between the two windows. You click on the little X in the upper right corner. It closes the current window, and the other document is still open. If you were to click on the big X, it closes the current window and the other document is still open. Basically both X’s behave the same.
Now let’s try Microsoft Excel. You have two spreadsheets open. And you’ve got two tabs on the start bar thing. But you only have one window. You click on the little X, it closes the current spreadsheet. You click on the big X it closes Excel.
So to recap:
Word:
- 2 documents
- 2 windows
- 2 tabs
- clicking little X closes 1 document, 1 window, 1 tab
- clicking big X closes 1 document, 1 window, 1 tab
Excel:
- 2 spreadsheet
- 1 window
- 2 tabs
- clicking little X closes 1 spreadsheet, 0 windows, 1 tab
- clicking big X closes 2/all spreadsheets, 1 window, 2/all tabs
So who’s at fault? Where does the confusion come from? It’s because both apps decided to mix and match the old school Windows 3.1 inherited MDI interface with the post 95 tabs interface. And they mixed and matched inconsistently. Word basically ignores the MDI thing (if the document is “maximized” with in the container) but still hosts a little X. Excel acts like a MDI app, but creates tabs for each document.
What the hell…
March 31st, 2006 at 9:23 am
I love shit like this! I don’t like the problem, but I like finding and seeing things out-of-the-ordinary like this.
Unfortunately, I can’t have a look at it right now. My windows box only has 128MB of RAM. My brother fried some of his memory a while back and I gave him my 512MB stick because I mostly use my iBook anyway. The winbox takes forever to load or get anything done. I expect this.
Earlier this week I was using a classmates computer. She’s running an old Sony VAIO that should only have Windows 98 on it. It runs at 700 MHz and has 128MB of RAM. What surprised me is that her computer is relatively useable. It thrashes the hard drive, but a web browser doesn’t take too long to open and she can browse the web. My compy with the same amount of RAM is entirely unuseable. It literally takes minutes to load anything and then the program itself runs like crap.
The only thing I can imagine it is are the service packs. I keep my winbox clean and up to date. Hers was infected with numerous viruses and spyware. However, she’s only running SP1. I dunno what the difference would be. If anything I hope that later service packs would provide performance enhancements (are you laughing?) or at least do their best to retain previous performance.