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I agree with you that many features of Office seem to be aimed at the
completely clueless. That is a problem with an application that is
supposed to be a sort of "Swiss Army knife" to serve many audiences at
one go.
In my opinion, the use of Microsoft Office as a tech doc tool is
ill-considered to begin with. Too much time must be spent with
work-arounds for things that *still* don't work correctly (can we say
"autonumbering" one more time?)
Unfortunately, Frame was getting sort of long in the tooth last time I used it.
However, as for something that works on a thumb drive, I have good
news! You need not compromise with a cut-down app at
all--OpenOffice.org has been available in a portable version for a few
years now, and works very well. See, for example,
htp://www.portableapps.com. They have many other apps that can be
loaded on the same thumb drive, too, to make a surprsingly complete
software setup you can adjust to the way you work...like your own
fully customized version of Firefox, for instance.
Note there plenty of other resources from these places, including
photo editors, password managers, and much more.
I hope this helps!
David
On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 09:00, <techwr-l-request -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> wrote:
> From: "Lauren" <lauren -at- writeco -dot- net>
>
> I think that the Office ribbon is effective for people who have *no*
> experience with Office, they loathe Office, or they simply want something
> completely different. I think that most people who use Office on a daily
> basis would prefer the original interface because we know where everything
> is. Personally, I do not mind that MS adds items to the toolbars, but to
> completely change the toolbars into something absolutely unintuitive for the
> veteran Office user is absolutely moronic. The learning curve of the
> "ribbon" is so much longer than configuring Office 2007 with an add-in that
> restores the toolbars and in reverting to older versions of Office, that it
> is not worth the effort to me. I am looking for an effective Office-like
> mini-app or Java-app that I can keep on my thumb drive so that I do not need
> to deal with client mistakes of using Office 2007.
>
> Lauren
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