Whack the Pack
Just installed my MS Office 2004 upgrade. I'm passing no comment on that (I'll live with with all the usual daily annoyances Office has to offer, as ever), but I have to make mention of the outrageous amount of packaging.
The product essentially ships in a standard DVD case - with the product key on the back of the DVD case and a little brochure inside. But it comes inside an easter-egg-style double sided plastic case which also comes inside another plastic case, with a paper/card insert, and two plastic ends to keep everything in place.
What a waste. Reminds me of the outrageous additional carboard cases American CDs had (still have?) at one time.
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Update. Actually, I uninstalled it this morning. When you consider the hoo-hah they made about it, it seemed to be the most pointless upgrade ever. If anything, slightly slower (on my work dual processor G4 800MHz) but basically the same. The new notepad view in Word struck me as useless when I read about it, and so it proved to be. I couldn't imagine ever needing to use it. And it bloody went and installed all the fonts I hate and uninstalled the last time all over again.
Sheesh. Someone else in the office needed it, so I let them have it. Between the eyes. There's only so far you can go with a word processor isn't there? Once you've got beyond the words and the paragraphs, the page numbering and the footnotes, anything else you add ends up getting in the way. This strikes me as being a bit like the fabled move from Word 5 to Word 6, from useful software to useless (and slow) bloatware. I bet there are still loads of Mac users happily using Word 5. I'd use MacWrite if you could still get it.
On that subject, I should point out that -- a lot of the time -- I use the (free) TextEdit you get with Mac OS X. You can open Word docs with it, save things as Rich Text Format, and do 100% of the things that you need to do 90% of the time.
The product essentially ships in a standard DVD case - with the product key on the back of the DVD case and a little brochure inside. But it comes inside an easter-egg-style double sided plastic case which also comes inside another plastic case, with a paper/card insert, and two plastic ends to keep everything in place.
What a waste. Reminds me of the outrageous additional carboard cases American CDs had (still have?) at one time.
============
Update. Actually, I uninstalled it this morning. When you consider the hoo-hah they made about it, it seemed to be the most pointless upgrade ever. If anything, slightly slower (on my work dual processor G4 800MHz) but basically the same. The new notepad view in Word struck me as useless when I read about it, and so it proved to be. I couldn't imagine ever needing to use it. And it bloody went and installed all the fonts I hate and uninstalled the last time all over again.
Sheesh. Someone else in the office needed it, so I let them have it. Between the eyes. There's only so far you can go with a word processor isn't there? Once you've got beyond the words and the paragraphs, the page numbering and the footnotes, anything else you add ends up getting in the way. This strikes me as being a bit like the fabled move from Word 5 to Word 6, from useful software to useless (and slow) bloatware. I bet there are still loads of Mac users happily using Word 5. I'd use MacWrite if you could still get it.
On that subject, I should point out that -- a lot of the time -- I use the (free) TextEdit you get with Mac OS X. You can open Word docs with it, save things as Rich Text Format, and do 100% of the things that you need to do 90% of the time.
posted by Anonymous at
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
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