Too little…too much?

Posted on February 20, 2008

Do they give us too much or do we just use too little?

Primarily thinking here about MS Office and all of it’s incarnations over the years. Like the OS, it has grown so much with every new version that things get too bloated to actually use.

I used to think that games ran the PC market, that Intel and AMD wouldn’t need to develop new chips (faster,faster…) if they only had to contend with the non-gaming segment of things. Not so sure anymore, as I deal with Vista and Office 07.

Which brings the question. Just how much do I use all the great stuff they put in Office? I’m probably not too far off with what the surveys show on this for the general user.

Survey Says — Paste, Save, Copy, Undo, Bold. That’s it, the 5 most used functions in Word that account for a full third of all commands used. So as you begin to try and use less common features, you find you can’t find them as they are so many in number and not often logically located. It’s like doing a Google search. Most times you can find what you looked for in the first 2 pages of results. But if you don’t, good luck to you because the deeper you go, the less targeted the sites get, and you often are just left hoping you’ll stumble on what you’re seeking.