My sabbatical is coming to an end, so I’ve begun prepping my class for the term that starts Monday. I’m teaching the honors section of introductory E&M, and for the intro classes, I lecture off PowerPoint. We’re starting an entirely new syllabus this year, and I plan to use my spiffy tablet PC to do my lectures, so I’ve been making up new lecture slides.<\/p>\n
At times like this, I wish I got paid an hourly wage, because I’d be tempted to send Microsoft a bill for the time I’ve wasted because of their redesign of Office. I spent an hour figuring out how to get things back to the way I want them, after wasting probably two hours trying to work within their new paradigm.<\/p>\n
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In the old Office, a large number of drawing tools were available on the standard tool bar at the bottom of the screen, and I could customize the tools that appeared in the main tool bar at the top to include things I use all the time (superscript, subscript, insert symbol) and remove things I never use (pretty much all of the line-spacing and bulleted-list tools). Not so for the new Office, which has opted for minimum customizability, and maximum screen area taken up by toolbars.<\/p>\n
The chief effect of this was to at least double the number of mouse-clicks required for any operation. Want to draw a rectangle? There’s no longer a rectangle-drawing button on the standard toolbar– you need to click the “Shapes” button on the fat new toolbar (excuse me, “Ribbon”), then select the rectangle tool from a pull-down menu. The same for inserting a text box, drawing a line, or an oval, or anything else. Want to change the thickness of a line? That used to be one pop-up menu, but now it’s two– click “Shape Outline,” then “Weight” then select the weight you want. Same for dashes and arrows.<\/p>\n
Subscript and superscript were particularly nice– those went from one click to four: highlight the text, right-click on it, select “Format,” select “Font,” click the appropriate check-box.<\/p>\n
Changing the defaults is even more fun– if you go to the “design” tab (which pops up a whole new “Ribbon”), you see a “fonts” button, which will get you a pull-down menu that has “create new fonts” as one of the options, and will let you set the default font for titles and regular text. It does not, however, allow you to select a default size<\/strong> for either of these, so I spent a while having every single text box I inserted come in at 18 point, which is a little too small to be read clearly from the back of the classroom.<\/p>\n It turns out that you can change the default font size and color for a given document (though not for the program as a whole, so it needs to be re-done for every new document), by the incredibly intuitive means of right-clicking on the border of a text box– not<\/strong> the text, the border<\/strong> of the box– and choosing “Set as Default Text Box.” I had to Google for that.<\/p>\n So, I spent an hour re-customizing PowerPoint to allow me to do the things I need to do in an efficient manner. I created a Custom Toolbar with all the commands I normally use, basically re-creating the old toolbar set-up. This was a fun experience as well, because as always with Microsoft, you need to know exactly what they call things in order to find them– it took a while to get “Oval” as the name for the ellipse-drawing tool (I’m a science nerd), and I wouldn’t’ve guessed “Straight Arrow Connector” for “line with an arrow at one end.”<\/p>\n So, I’ve had to give up another strip of screen real estate to make common commands readily accessible. Meanwhile, I have a huge block of the home “Ribbon” taken up with paragraph-formatting tools that I will never, ever use, because putting full paragraphs of text on lecture slides is death.<\/p>\n I’m sure the new paradigm works brilliantly, provided you only want to give the sort of “three bullet points to the left of one square graphic” talks that they provide standard layouts for. Of course, that’s also the quickest and easiest way to create a really bad<\/strong> talk that will turn your audience’s brains into cheese. It’s no use at all for physics talks.<\/p>\n My next giant time-sink project will be getting some LaTeX add-on to work, so I can do equations well and quickly. Yeah, I know, they have an Equation Editor built-in, and it does an OK job, with one problem: you can’t change the color of the equations. At least, you can’t change the color in any obvious way, and they’ve disabled the Help files for Equation Editor in keeping with their new approach to customer service…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My sabbatical is coming to an end, so I’ve begun prepping my class for the term that starts Monday. I’m teaching the honors section of introductory E&M, and for the intro classes, I lecture off PowerPoint. We’re starting an entirely new syllabus this year, and I plan to use my spiffy tablet PC to do… Continue reading On the Suckitude of Office 2007<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2431\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}