What exactly do I gain?
Miss a few, gain a lot? What exactly do I gain ?
I upgraded from Office 4.2 to 2000, and have not upgraded since. 4.2 did everything I needed, and did much of it better; e.g, 2000 did away with the multiple-document interface (MDI) in Word, so in order to open two Word documents at the same time I had to loose valuable screen real estate with an additional Title Bar, Menu Bar, Standard and Formatting toolbars, etc., by opening a second instance of Word. I understand that MDI was restored in Office XP, but why should I have to upgrade again to get back what I had in an earlier version?
That is just one example. Others, in brief, include a much more difficult to manage bullet & numbering system, the inability to delete styles from Normal.dot that I don't use and don't want, the ridiculous splitting of the Help system in 2003 (I have to use it at the companies I work for) so you can't just minimize the Help screen; you have to close out both the Help search and display, separately, before you can get back to your primary focus, the document you're working on.
Bottom line: Microsoft has long since abandoned serving its customers; it is now only interested in establishing and preserving its revenue stream via planned obsolescence.
