Word and Excel are both part of the Office “suite” of programs. Like all Windows programs, they open in windows with a big red “X” button in the upper right-hand corner, and a smaller grey “x” below that. In either program, if you click the small grey “x” button, it closes just the file that you’re looking at in that window.
In Word, when you have multiple files open, and click the big red “X,” it closes just the file you’re looking at, leaving the other files open.
In Excel, when you have multiple files open, and click the big red “X,” it closes the entire program, and all the open files.
I don’t actually have a preference about which of these actions would be preferred. I would personally go with having the big red “X” close all open windows, because otherwise the small grey “x” is kind of redundant, but it really doesn’t matter. You can make a sensible case for either of those actions.
What is not in any way sensible is having two programs that are both part of Office do two different things when you click the big red “X.” Everything else looks just the same– the same symbols on the buttons, the same keyboard shortcuts, the same format for the utterly useless help files– but they behave completely differently when you start trying to close files, and it’s absolutely maddening.
Three comments about Microcrap Vista, the secure and bugless, fast-executing successor to Wincrap XP:
1) Vista is already into its first Service Pack though it hasn’t yet been released. It is as porous to intrusion as a payday hooker’s black mesh panties.
2) Vista validation is already cracked. The countdown can be stopped at 30 days, allowing indefinite use. That is why BillGates is so forceful with applying those “Service Packs”.
3) One gigabyte RAM recommended for Vista startup. Absent at least another GB of thumbdrive to handle the swapfile, have a nice thermos of coffee and a bag of crullers along for the ride. To venture post-boot, remember that 32-bit computing tops off at 4 GB RAM.
You are discomfitted by a couple of “close” diddles? Microcrap: None of us separately is as stupid as all of us together. Knoppix LIVE! DvD, and remember to set the North American keyboard at boot.
So don’t use Office.
Gee, you just noticed that? Or just got irritated enough to blog about it? I got so confused when my company ‘upgraded’ to Office XP. The first time I clicked the larger X in Word, and only my current document closed, I said, “Huh! Oh, OK!” Then, a few days later, I did that in Excel, expecting the same new behavior, and had to go and re-open half a dozen spreadsheets. Grrr.
One of the other new, improved behaviors in Office XP is that you can alt-tab between the different workbooks in Excel. You used to only be able to alt-tab between applications, moving between workbooks within Excel with ctrl-page down. (IIRC). But now you can just alt-tab! Except when you can’t–sometimes it doesn’t work. When? Whenever Office feels like messing with your head, as far as I can tell. Double grrr.
As our IT guy says, “the nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them…..”
They also respond to tab-actions differently. If memory serves (since I am in an Office-free state, at the moment) Word lets you tab between them only with alt-tab and alt-ctrl-tab, which is the default to tabe between separate applications.
Excel will let you do that, but will also let you do ctrl-tab and (I think) ctrl-shift-tab to tab back and forth only between different Excel sheets.
I see to remember PowerPoint having yet another behaviour.
Which in the ultimate scheme of things, is not that big a deal, except that I may have cause to have half a dozen multi-page spreadsheets open and half a dozen Word reports going, and dammit, I like tab-navigation. It’d be nice if the applications had some level of consistency.
They also removed the functionality from previous versions that let you have multiple sessions with multiple worksheets open in each. You can now have multiple worksheets in one session, or a separate session for each. Not both.
I’m with Steinn:
http://www.OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice just doesn’t quite cut it. I have my students hand their lab reports in electronically, and 90% of them use Word. There are just enough conflicts between the two programs that it’s easier to deal with Word than to deal with the glitches that show up when switching from one to the other.
What I really ought to do is ditch Excel, which is a horrible program. But, again, the students use it, and it’s easier to adopt their program of choice than to deal with the wailing and gnashing of teeth that would come from trying to force them to use a better program.
OOo imports Excel spreadsheets very well. I’ve had some fairly complicated spreadsheets import into OOo, without problem.
Nowadays, the Word import is good enough for me, usually. But, yeah, if you want page formatting to stay the same, you’re probably hosed.
But — I don’t use Microsoft Office *or* Windows. If people are going to turn stuff in electronically, they ought to use PDF. Some have mailed me Word files, but that was a case where it just needed to be text, and that day I was too tired to do my usual “educate the user” thing about how one should be e-mailing plain text if it’s plain text, PDF otherwise. (The only time it makes sense to mail Word files is when you and somebody else are collaboratively writing something. That’s the same situation in which it would make sense to mail LaTeX source code. For anything else… use an open and documented “display” format like PDF! Then you don’t need to depend on other people using the same software at all!)
-Rob
Yeah, open office is good enough for my purposes, which mainly include reading various memos from the administration, and on occasion updating my CV…but I’d feel pretty comfortable, as Rob suggests, requiring students to convert their documents to readable PDF, but it may just be inexperience on my part.
Use a Mac. The Mac version of Office is much more consistent and just plain nicer to work with. And, you can open student’s files from WinXP or Mac OS X. There is also the nicety of not having to worry about crapware. Hell, get any one of the current Macintosh computers and run both Mac OS and Winderz if you feel you have to.
I don’t generally have students hand papers in as PDF because I try to mark them up electronically, and I don’t have a good way to add text to PDF files. If they send me Word documents, I can just use the “Track Changes” feature to put my comments in colored text, and have everything easily visible. This has a number of really nice advantages, and I’m willing to put up with Word to be able to mark the labs on the computer.
I see, Acrobat pro has that functionality, alas it is only slightly less irritating than MS Word. I guess you are stuck…
Last summer I finally stumbled on a solution to a very annoying problem I’d been having with MS Access importing data from MS Excel spreadsheets. The spreadsheets contained very long part numbers, and sometimes they would be be imported in scientific notation, which was undesirable but very hard to get rid of.
I stumbled on the revelation that the scientific notation only happened when I imported a spreadsheet that I had open in Excel at the time. If I closed the spreadsheet and did the importation again, it came in correctly.
I would prefer that the big red X close the Office application, uninstall it, then lauch a worm to destroy all copies of the executable and source code for the program. Unfortunately I can’t figure out how to select this behavior as the default in the Preferences dialog. Anyone?
Heh, I still use Office 97 because hitting the big X in Word closes the entire program, just as in Excel. That’s the biggest single reason I rejected Office 2000, and I’ve resisted upgrading ever since.
Microsoft is SUXX, and we can use Open Source soft. But wy we still use Windows, lets be saved from it.