The "AutoFit" feature is located in the giant Format menu on the ribbon, in the Cells group.
Great! Now resize the window:)
It's no more difficult than finding it in the Format menu, then Column, then AutoFit, back in Excel 2003.
I disagree - it never moved around before.
Besides, most people just double-click on the column divider anyway, which is why this feature probably didn't get top billing. If it were more-commonly used, it would have.
Like I said, it is less-frequently used. But I generally like to use it rather than the double-click because I usually want to exclude the headers from the operation.
You mention that the icons move around when your screen is resized, but how often do regular users do this? Studies show that most users run Office apps in maximized mode.
I'm not most users:) On my big monitor, it would be a colossal waste of space to run anything but Excel at full res. But even if I were a full-screener, I have several computers with varying resolutions. On the laptop, the Format button is in a different spot than on my work desktop monitor, even at full res.
And even if they do move things around, this is still better than Office 2003's toolbars which had to truncate icons that didn't fit into the chevron menu which everyone hates.
As I said, the ribbon concept isn't a bad toolbar replacement (or could be made so with a few tweaks). I just want the menu bar like they have in their Mac versions.
And, Copy as Picture is in the Copy menu, not Paste. Though it is *next to* Paste, it's very clearly a little pull-down menu next to Copy.
No, you are looking at 2010. In 2007 there was no Copy drop-down. I am very glad that they fixed this, though it made me chuckle every time.
All the mitigation we can do is meaningless if a volcano erupts in 10 years that causes mass cooling and then oh shit, we've gotta make it warmer.
I think I should be more specific when I say "mitigation". I'm not proposing that we try to control the climate - only deal with the after-effects. Everything from upgrading seawalls to planning for food security. And of course as you say: migration.
In the US, even if a coastal city like New York went under, we would be fine after some economic pain and it wouldn't cause a war. Hell, even if the entire state of Florida had to pack it up, it would happen fairly slowly and we'd just have a big building boom. There might even be enough empty buildings around Vegas:)
What worries me are places barely eking out an existence with substance farming and not enough land per person, as is. Those places go to war over stuff like climate change, and we tend to get drawn into such things.
The big mistake is assuming that every artist deserve to become a millionaire.
I agree with you, but I still think that copyright is important for artists. Sure, musicians can do what they did before copyright - perform. But what of a fiction author? I suppose they could get paid for signings and whatnot, but I think having exclusive commercial rights to their work would be reasonable.
'You need to target the organizations that should have the ability to pay license versus going after individual users or the people who crack the software.'"
This basically sums up how copyright law should be enacted. Make it commercial-only. There would still be plenty of incentive to create for artists, and regular people wouldn't need to have a deep understanding of the law to find out if they are legally entitled to sing happy birthday to their kid or not.
So what are the error bars on climate change? 1% every 1000 years? 100 years? 10 years?
I'm not sure what the state of the art is right now - only that it has gotten progressively tighter over time. In the 70s, the models were just as likely to predict cooling as they were warming. By the 90s, even the most conservative models started to track towards warming, and now there is broad consensus across all models AFAIK.
I'm still not sold on the global warming bandwagon. I'm not dismissing it, but call me a denier if you must.
It's fine to be skeptical. I was skeptical in the 90s when there wasn't a scientific consensus. But I'm just an engineer, not a climate scientist - I depend on the expertise of others. If everyone who has ever taken the time to build a model comes to the same conclusion, and the only detractors are in different fields and/or have some vested interest in being detractors... well, that's good enough for me. Not for you? That's fine, too.
What I'm even less sold on is if global warming will be a catastrophe. In fact, what are the error bars on that? Is it possible that global warming will be a good thing for mankind?
Well, change is rarely a good thing in the short term. Even if it did something amazing like flood the Sahara, it would create a lot of wars in the short term as people were displaced and fighting for resources. But I don't think anything can be done - people are like locusts. We will burn every last drop of oil and every last nugget of coal - it is inevitable. We really need to spend more time talking about mitigation. So even though we might disagree on root cause, we might have room to agree on mitigation:)
I won't berate you like some of the others, but I would ask you to think about what you wrote in mathematical terms. The time difference between low and high tide is about 6 hours. At the time of the evacuations, the hurricane had not even hit North Carolina yet, which is roughly 500 miles away. The hurricane was moving around 15MPH. At that speed and distance, missing the predicted speed by a single MPH changes the arrival by between 2 and 2.4 hours, give or take. So while the high and low tides are very well understood, the path and speed that a hurricane will travel over the course of a few days is not, and Jersey landfall estimates included several hours of variation.
Could you elaborate exactly what features power users are missing / harder to access?
I think the other posters here are doing a fine job. My personal pet peeve is that the ribbon adjusts itself and moves around depending on the size of the window. So while I know keyboard shortcuts for my most commonly-used commands, there are some like "Autofit Columns" that are maddeningly hard to find (they are hidden in their same old format toolbar, that is now a button). If it were always in the same place it wouldn't be so bad, but go ahead and resize your window and watch the Format button jump around!
And UI customization is maddening. You have to learn the whole XML scheme for all but the most trivial of modifications. Unless you are an Excel developer, this is a tremendous waste of time and energy. Ever since Office 6 in like 1993, you could edit the toolbars and the buttons. Now you can only edit little areas of the ribbon and choose from the MS limited pallet of buttons. You want a custom button? Package up an icon file with some shady XML packer thing into a special add-on type file.
I actually like some of the improvements in Office, and I think that even the ribbon has improved since the 2007 release... I mean "Copy As Picture" in the "Paste" button??? Really??? If they continue to add customization features it will get better, but I'm afraid they will never make it as consistent as the old menus were (after you turned off the auto-hiding feature, naturally). You could argue about the logic of some of the placement in the old menus, but at least they stayed put!
"It's an exact science! Everyone agrees on the conclusions
You must be off your rocker.
Geez, people assume we can predict everything [myway.com]. Weather prediction ain't an exact science.
Haven't you ever heard of margin of error? The National Hurricane Center publishes everything with error margins displayed right on a color chart... The hurricane fell well within their error bars. IIRC, it had a 10% chance reported for hurricane speed winds in South Jersey on Friday morning. Officials decided to evacuate based on that and the potential for flooding.
Climate scientists also have error bars - really, really wide ones that get even wider as you go into the more distant future. Thing is, everyone who has actually put the effort in to build a model in recent times comes away with the same conclusion - even their most conservative model still predicts anthropogenic warming.
Neither is an exact science. Some won't even credit either field with being a "science". But they do make fairly solid predictions within their stated margin of error more often than not. They give you your odds.
When they called most of the evacuations, it was still a category 3. I think the government officials made the right choice.
And then it hit New Jersey at dead-low tide during a new moon - one couldn't get any luckier than that. The Jersey Shore floods during a regular full moon high tide with a strong easterly wind (it doesn't let the water recede from the back bays).
But the media, well... their job is to get you to watch TV. To their credit, I was watching because of their hype and thus caught a tornado warning that I otherwise would not have known about.
The main reason that they are going for the ribbon interface is because it is far easier to use with touch input
If Apple can make their OS in touch and desktop flavors, then why the hell can't MS's army of programmers?:)
but if you use it for a bit most users do find it better for commonly accessed tools.
Why in the world would you use MS Office if you only need the functions that are on the home ribbon?
The ribbon gets in the way of power users, which is why most of the reaction is negative here. Windows is supposed to be for work, and they are turning into the computerized version of No Child Left Behind.
They partially fixed that in 2010, but the Office applications in general are all less customizable than they were in 2003.
you can't show things from more than one "category" at once
That's true, though really that's just a detail that could be fixed with some little "thumbtack" icon.
But yeah, the ribbon is not really welcome at all.
I've resorted to just googling what I want to do immediately if the old keyboard shortcut doesn't work now, it's quicker
LOL, me too! MS help is so blindingly awful that I just Google everything. How is their search function so, so bad??? It's like they keep shining the same early 90s help system turd.
My workplace switched to 2007 over 12 months ago and people are *STILL* struggling every day to find things which used to be easy.
The thing is, it's not a bad toolbar replacement, but it is an absolutely dreadful menu replacement. It is so much harder to find less-frequently-used functions now, and half the time when you find them, they are in a menu behind a little button!
The craziest thing is that Mac Office still has the ribbon - but RETAINS THE MENU! Why can't they do this on their flagship platform?
Well, yeah, LOL, but I sort of live in the now:) Probably have to re-evaluate next year. I'm torn between the better network of Verizon and just throwing the smartphone in the garbage and going to prepaid.
I won't google the name of a UK department store just to sound educated:)
I'm not saying that their protest wasn't up to "my" standards. I'm saying it wasn't up to the general standard of "newsworthy". If they sat their 2000 asses on a freeway and made the cops arrest them individually it sure as hell would have made the news. Civil disobedience doesn't require you to burn down your own neighborhood.
I used Sprint until their customer service essentially told me I was crazy when I tried to help them resolve a bug in their usage reporting.
I've heard that their customer service isn't in absolute last place anymore, but I've been pleased with the service I get at T-Mobile, and I'm grandfathered into an unbeatable plan.
um... the more expensive $20/mo option is ***300M*** ?
First off, you have the plans confused - Verizon (our most expensive carrier) has 300MB for $20 as their lowest-tier plan.
Second, Europe has a different pricing model for mobiles. In Europe, you get charged extra for calling TO a mobile from a landline. In the US, there is no difference between calling landlines and mobiles.
Both systems have their merits, but you can't just compare what the mobile users are paying without also considering what the callers are paying.
When I think of "network neutrality", I think of connections outside of their own network - control of their pipe to the larger internet. I definitely don't expect sites outside of the ISP's network to load as quickly as those inside, and I don't object to them setting up things like caching servers inside their own network.
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The "AutoFit" feature is located in the giant Format menu on the ribbon, in the Cells group.
Great! Now resize the window :)
It's no more difficult than finding it in the Format menu, then Column, then AutoFit, back in Excel 2003.
I disagree - it never moved around before.
Besides, most people just double-click on the column divider anyway, which is why this feature probably didn't get top billing. If it were more-commonly used, it would have.
Like I said, it is less-frequently used. But I generally like to use it rather than the double-click because I usually want to exclude the headers from the operation.
You mention that the icons move around when your screen is resized, but how often do regular users do this? Studies show that most users run Office apps in maximized mode.
I'm not most users :) On my big monitor, it would be a colossal waste of space to run anything but Excel at full res. But even if I were a full-screener, I have several computers with varying resolutions. On the laptop, the Format button is in a different spot than on my work desktop monitor, even at full res.
And even if they do move things around, this is still better than Office 2003's toolbars which had to truncate icons that didn't fit into the chevron menu which everyone hates.
As I said, the ribbon concept isn't a bad toolbar replacement (or could be made so with a few tweaks). I just want the menu bar like they have in their Mac versions.
And, Copy as Picture is in the Copy menu, not Paste. Though it is *next to* Paste, it's very clearly a little pull-down menu next to Copy.
No, you are looking at 2010. In 2007 there was no Copy drop-down. I am very glad that they fixed this, though it made me chuckle every time.
All the mitigation we can do is meaningless if a volcano erupts in 10 years that causes mass cooling and then oh shit, we've gotta make it warmer.
I think I should be more specific when I say "mitigation". I'm not proposing that we try to control the climate - only deal with the after-effects. Everything from upgrading seawalls to planning for food security. And of course as you say: migration.
In the US, even if a coastal city like New York went under, we would be fine after some economic pain and it wouldn't cause a war. Hell, even if the entire state of Florida had to pack it up, it would happen fairly slowly and we'd just have a big building boom. There might even be enough empty buildings around Vegas :)
What worries me are places barely eking out an existence with substance farming and not enough land per person, as is. Those places go to war over stuff like climate change, and we tend to get drawn into such things.
The big mistake is assuming that every artist deserve to become a millionaire.
I agree with you, but I still think that copyright is important for artists. Sure, musicians can do what they did before copyright - perform. But what of a fiction author? I suppose they could get paid for signings and whatnot, but I think having exclusive commercial rights to their work would be reasonable.
If only the RIAA paid attention
Or lawmakers! There is a quote in the summary:
This basically sums up how copyright law should be enacted. Make it commercial-only. There would still be plenty of incentive to create for artists, and regular people wouldn't need to have a deep understanding of the law to find out if they are legally entitled to sing happy birthday to their kid or not.
Sorry - a menubar replacement is what I meant.
So what are the error bars on climate change? 1% every 1000 years? 100 years? 10 years?
I'm not sure what the state of the art is right now - only that it has gotten progressively tighter over time. In the 70s, the models were just as likely to predict cooling as they were warming. By the 90s, even the most conservative models started to track towards warming, and now there is broad consensus across all models AFAIK.
I'm still not sold on the global warming bandwagon. I'm not dismissing it, but call me a denier if you must.
It's fine to be skeptical. I was skeptical in the 90s when there wasn't a scientific consensus. But I'm just an engineer, not a climate scientist - I depend on the expertise of others. If everyone who has ever taken the time to build a model comes to the same conclusion, and the only detractors are in different fields and/or have some vested interest in being detractors... well, that's good enough for me. Not for you? That's fine, too.
What I'm even less sold on is if global warming will be a catastrophe. In fact, what are the error bars on that? Is it possible that global warming will be a good thing for mankind?
Well, change is rarely a good thing in the short term. Even if it did something amazing like flood the Sahara, it would create a lot of wars in the short term as people were displaced and fighting for resources. But I don't think anything can be done - people are like locusts. We will burn every last drop of oil and every last nugget of coal - it is inevitable. We really need to spend more time talking about mitigation. So even though we might disagree on root cause, we might have room to agree on mitigation :)
I won't berate you like some of the others, but I would ask you to think about what you wrote in mathematical terms. The time difference between low and high tide is about 6 hours. At the time of the evacuations, the hurricane had not even hit North Carolina yet, which is roughly 500 miles away. The hurricane was moving around 15MPH. At that speed and distance, missing the predicted speed by a single MPH changes the arrival by between 2 and 2.4 hours, give or take. So while the high and low tides are very well understood, the path and speed that a hurricane will travel over the course of a few days is not, and Jersey landfall estimates included several hours of variation.
Could you elaborate exactly what features power users are missing / harder to access?
I think the other posters here are doing a fine job. My personal pet peeve is that the ribbon adjusts itself and moves around depending on the size of the window. So while I know keyboard shortcuts for my most commonly-used commands, there are some like "Autofit Columns" that are maddeningly hard to find (they are hidden in their same old format toolbar, that is now a button). If it were always in the same place it wouldn't be so bad, but go ahead and resize your window and watch the Format button jump around!
And UI customization is maddening. You have to learn the whole XML scheme for all but the most trivial of modifications. Unless you are an Excel developer, this is a tremendous waste of time and energy. Ever since Office 6 in like 1993, you could edit the toolbars and the buttons. Now you can only edit little areas of the ribbon and choose from the MS limited pallet of buttons. You want a custom button? Package up an icon file with some shady XML packer thing into a special add-on type file.
I actually like some of the improvements in Office, and I think that even the ribbon has improved since the 2007 release... I mean "Copy As Picture" in the "Paste" button??? Really??? If they continue to add customization features it will get better, but I'm afraid they will never make it as consistent as the old menus were (after you turned off the auto-hiding feature, naturally). You could argue about the logic of some of the placement in the old menus, but at least they stayed put!
"It's an exact science! Everyone agrees on the conclusions
You must be off your rocker.
Geez, people assume we can predict everything [myway.com]. Weather prediction ain't an exact science.
Haven't you ever heard of margin of error? The National Hurricane Center publishes everything with error margins displayed right on a color chart... The hurricane fell well within their error bars. IIRC, it had a 10% chance reported for hurricane speed winds in South Jersey on Friday morning. Officials decided to evacuate based on that and the potential for flooding.
Climate scientists also have error bars - really, really wide ones that get even wider as you go into the more distant future. Thing is, everyone who has actually put the effort in to build a model in recent times comes away with the same conclusion - even their most conservative model still predicts anthropogenic warming.
Neither is an exact science. Some won't even credit either field with being a "science". But they do make fairly solid predictions within their stated margin of error more often than not. They give you your odds.
When they called most of the evacuations, it was still a category 3. I think the government officials made the right choice.
And then it hit New Jersey at dead-low tide during a new moon - one couldn't get any luckier than that. The Jersey Shore floods during a regular full moon high tide with a strong easterly wind (it doesn't let the water recede from the back bays).
But the media, well... their job is to get you to watch TV. To their credit, I was watching because of their hype and thus caught a tornado warning that I otherwise would not have known about.
Yeah, we should never improve our data collection methods when someone's life is at risk.
The main reason that they are going for the ribbon interface is because it is far easier to use with touch input
If Apple can make their OS in touch and desktop flavors, then why the hell can't MS's army of programmers? :)
but if you use it for a bit most users do find it better for commonly accessed tools.
Why in the world would you use MS Office if you only need the functions that are on the home ribbon?
The ribbon gets in the way of power users, which is why most of the reaction is negative here. Windows is supposed to be for work, and they are turning into the computerized version of No Child Left Behind.
I suspect that it was more likely that they saw people in no hurry to move from Office 2004, which has pretty much all of the same features as 2011.
Plus, as you allude, your application looks pretty silly on Mac just wasting the top 50 pixels for no real reason beyond religion.
they removed all ability to customise it
They partially fixed that in 2010, but the Office applications in general are all less customizable than they were in 2003.
you can't show things from more than one "category" at once
That's true, though really that's just a detail that could be fixed with some little "thumbtack" icon.
But yeah, the ribbon is not really welcome at all.
I've resorted to just googling what I want to do immediately if the old keyboard shortcut doesn't work now, it's quicker
LOL, me too! MS help is so blindingly awful that I just Google everything. How is their search function so, so bad??? It's like they keep shining the same early 90s help system turd.
My workplace switched to 2007 over 12 months ago and people are *STILL* struggling every day to find things which used to be easy.
Same here.
The ribbon is just awful.
The thing is, it's not a bad toolbar replacement, but it is an absolutely dreadful menu replacement. It is so much harder to find less-frequently-used functions now, and half the time when you find them, they are in a menu behind a little button!
The craziest thing is that Mac Office still has the ribbon - but RETAINS THE MENU! Why can't they do this on their flagship platform?
All the companies suck :)
new android version for galaxy S II!
Don't get your hopes up - they'll probably just delete the "next picture" and "previous picture" preview in the photo application.
Right, because Samsung doesn't hold any patents and doesn't enforce them.
Unless you are an LCD maker, of course.
And they would never sue anyone for simple writing an article poking fun at their glorious leader.
Well, yeah, LOL, but I sort of live in the now :) Probably have to re-evaluate next year. I'm torn between the better network of Verizon and just throwing the smartphone in the garbage and going to prepaid.
I have to assume that it's a ploy to get them in trouble for spamming. The copy is way too close to sarcasm.
or use a different separator?
Seems like a time to make OLD2NEW.COM, where you run the old scripts/commands through it and it poops out the new version.
Seems cleaner.
I won't google the name of a UK department store just to sound educated :)
I'm not saying that their protest wasn't up to "my" standards. I'm saying it wasn't up to the general standard of "newsworthy". If they sat their 2000 asses on a freeway and made the cops arrest them individually it sure as hell would have made the news. Civil disobedience doesn't require you to burn down your own neighborhood.
I used Sprint until their customer service essentially told me I was crazy when I tried to help them resolve a bug in their usage reporting.
I've heard that their customer service isn't in absolute last place anymore, but I've been pleased with the service I get at T-Mobile, and I'm grandfathered into an unbeatable plan.
um... the more expensive $20/mo option is ***300M*** ?
First off, you have the plans confused - Verizon (our most expensive carrier) has 300MB for $20 as their lowest-tier plan.
Second, Europe has a different pricing model for mobiles. In Europe, you get charged extra for calling TO a mobile from a landline. In the US, there is no difference between calling landlines and mobiles.
Both systems have their merits, but you can't just compare what the mobile users are paying without also considering what the callers are paying.
At least that is network neutrality.
When I think of "network neutrality", I think of connections outside of their own network - control of their pipe to the larger internet. I definitely don't expect sites outside of the ISP's network to load as quickly as those inside, and I don't object to them setting up things like caching servers inside their own network.