Microsoft Productivity Time (LMPT) and the Learning of it.

It was an awful and painful experience to use Word 2007.

It is supposed to be user friendly and not at all.

Not so sweet story today, I should share with.

I was preparing to do a survey on some penetration testing of computer utilities with my students.

I wanted to do this but kept postponing it.

I tabulated 101 items of Apple, Microsoft, Linux and third party software for testings.

I did this on Abiword and made a Microsoft version since I have run out of toner in my printer.

I may have done this in about 15 minutes and prepared the printer setting to my liking and copied it into mini re-writable CD.

Then at the office I opened the file and made a copy in Microsoft had a printer view and there were some ugly sections.

Wanted to break them into new table section and right clicked and looked at the menu to find table split.

Mind you I have worked extensively with Microsoft from Win 95 to XP 2003 and have series of books on Words which are in the attic (I do not like to donate or burn them, they are museum pieces anyway) and I knew the exact utility to use.

The Table split.

I could find cell split but not table split.

After 10 minutes of searching I asked our Secretary for help.

She could not find it.

I asked one of my colleagues.

She could not find it.

Unfortunately the technician I trained in computing was on leave.

Then the chief technician came and did a page break and broke the table in a place not desirable for my liking.

After one hour everything was in a mess and print preview was a disaster.

I do printing only twice to see typos and keep as my copy and the other for final copy.

Thankfully my chief technician showed me the step to page break.

PageLayout and then a another layout and hundred of bizarre arrangement of word utilities.

I could not delete the page break and accidentally clicked layout and found the table menu and somewhere there I saw table split function almost hidden in the clutter of many other utilities I will never use in my life time.

I need to get the page break out tried 10 minutes with View  Menu to see  the background layout lines and I could find any.
Simply I could not delete the page break.

Annoyed I started undoing one step at a time and also deleting corrections of typos and after another 5 to 10 minutes, I was back to where  I started and with another numerous clicks got to split table (mind you I was an addict of tables) and split it exactly where I wanted got the printer layout checked  and did the typos again and saved and got a print out after one an a half hours.

That is  90 minutes divided by 5 pages and 18 minutes per page to get print ready material.

Original typing with five typos (I do many typos now due to poor sight) took probably 15 minutes.

This is what I call Microsoft Productivity Time (MPT for short) which is amazingly long and when its windows 8 comes this productivity time will grow by leaps and bounds.

Then I have to call it Learning the Microsoft Productivity Time (LMPT) for Win 8 and reading it will take another two hours.

Every time a new product comes productivity time lengthens.

That is how Microsoft make writers life writer friendly but the writer should use Abiword for the final product even though he is a Microsoft user.

It was 4 years ago I used Microsoft Word and extra time I saved during these four years I use for blogging on my life free of Microsoft.

Thanks Microsoft for your hard work on Win 8 and I will copy all the web publishing currently published on the web to calculate what a lot of productivity time writers waste on non existent product.

Postscript

I managed to find the way to delete the page break.

Go View and then to Outline and select the line and press the delete button.