Discussion on:

10 things deploying Microsoft Office can teach you

Don't do it and jump off the Microsoft merry-go-round!

For many small businesses, Office is an overbearing, unwieldy overkill, that something like LibreOffice will handle perfectly well, without the associated cost.

If you're going to have a cost of training, you may as well use it effectively, to gain a better long term ROI.

The author is so right that many users of Office, not matter how long they've been working with it, have an abysmal level of knowledge. And what's more worrying, seemingly no curiousity about what it might be able to do for them.

So they drag on using whatever method they found that works, or whatever they were told when they first got the job by someone who knew as little as they do.

And they get bad habits...As an example, my assistant persists in making quick changes by inserting adjustments in result formulas in Excel to see if that reconciles the figures, and then leaving them there instead of amending the data area. No wonder I'm going grey.

Don't create group policies restricting features that are decided by network admins that aren't power users and don't have a clue how the software is used by those who use it.

Of all the experiences I've had that might have resulted in a "geek out" moment, anything MS was not one of those experiences.

I have not ever deployed MS office, however I have hit obstacles due to a dim-bulb in IT deploying the latest and greatest on the PCs used by finance, and other departments. Here's an IT maxim: if it's not EXACTLY the same, it's different. Don't install the latest and greatest then walk away before confirming the end user is happy and can continue to meet their "productivity" requirements.

That was in Office 2007, when MS replaced the 'File' menu option with that Office logo button.

I installed 07 to get familiar with it. Soon I wanted to save and print a spreadsheet, but I couldn't find a readily apparent way to perform those tasks. Instead of immediately hitting the F1 key (another tool users aren't aware of or have forgotten), I decided to see how long it would take to figure it out on my own. After 30 minutes, I gave up, pushed F1, and learned that what I thought was just a logo was actually a clickable button. I made a note to point it out to each user as I upgraded his / her suite.

Apparently I wasn't the only one with this problem, since it was gone and 'File' was back in the 2010 version. Sometimes MS does realize it made a mistake. (Here's hoping they give Metro the same treatment in W9.)

There are sometimes pages on the MS site how to perform familiar tasks in the newest version of their applications.

My apologies for nit picking, but It was actually Office 2007 that introduced the "ribbon" interface and "Microsoft Office Button" that replaced the File menu.
Office 2010 replaced the button with the "File" tab that opens "Backstage" where Save, Open, Print, etc. options are located.

Cosmetic changes such as these remind me of when American auto makers used to change the front grill and head and tail light lenses from one year to the next to differentiate a particular year of the same car.Everything else -- body, frame, engine, interior -- would be the same.

I don't know that the ribbon was an improvement but it has undoubtedly sold a lot of books, training materials and classes. Perhaps new users learn to navigate the ribbon easier than the old menu & toolbar interfaces.

For existing users, such changes incur a great deal of lost productivity while they learn the new interface. Hopefully, they may learn to take advantage of both new and existing features that may provide shortcuts and increased productivity in the future.

And there will always be complaints about changes in user interfaces. While writing character-based applications in the 80's, when an item was added to or removed from numbered option menus, users would complain that they "have always pressed 2 then 5 then 12" to do such and such "but now it is 2 then 5 then 13!"