RE: Word -- printing comments only?

Subject: RE: Word -- printing comments only?
From: "Downing, David" <DavidDowning -at- Users -dot- com>
To: <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:46:08 -0400

From: Fred Ridder <docudoc -at- hotmail -dot- com>
Subject: RE: Word -- printing comments only?
To: Nancy Allison <maker -at- verizon -dot- net>, Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>


> Why oh why did Microsoft mess with such a useful feature!

All they did was move a reviewing-specific option from the Print dialog
to a task-specific toolbar. In Word 2007 they've moved even further
in the direction of organizing options by tasks (at least how they
define tasks...) rather than associating them with individual operations

in Word 2007. They seldom make any feature go away, but almost
always move things around as their vision of how people use the tool
evolves.

-Fred Ridder

-------------------------------------------------

This raises a question that I suppose I'm extra-sensitive to, because of
my former career as a technical service librarian -- i.e., a cataloger.
The specific operation in question is the printing of review comments
only. The question is -- exactly what category of operation SHOULD that
be put into? Should it be classed as a printing operations or a
reviewing operation? MS apparently thought one thing for awhile and
changed their minds.

This may seem like a digression from technical communication, but I
don't think so. It's related to the question of how to classify a
specific topic in a hierarchy of topics. In fact, I was just reading
Geoff Hart's "Information Design" column on this very subject in the
November 2007 INTERCOM. (Yeah, I'm a bit behind.)

Getting back to the subject of changes to MS Word, I would ask whether
MS is really improving the software if the result of their changes is to
fix it so nobody can find features they were using because those
features are no longer in the old familiar places. However, I realize
that I must also think of the new user who is learning Word initially
with the new version.

David
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