Monday, February 14, 2011

Poor design?

I ran into something using Microsoft Office 2010 that Microsoft should probably take note of. Take a look at this:



This is the ribbon bar in Office 2010. I've captured the top-left corner of two windows. That's Excel 2010 at the back and Word 2010 in front. Next to the "W" there's an icon of a diskette. That's the Save button. Clicking on this icon automatically saves the file.

Note the icon next to the Save icon, an arrow curving to the left. That's the Undo button. This button undo's, or removes, all the changes you've done since your last save.

So here's what happened. After carefully preparing a table, with data in it, making sure that everything was perfect, I swung my mouse over to that button to click it. But I accidentally hit the one next to it, a few pixels off, and my beautiful table was gone.

Fortunately, the one to the right of that, the icon with the arrow curved towards the right, is the Redo button and it lit up. So, I clicked on it and got my table back.

It seems to me that these two buttons, the Save and the Undo buttons, are too close together.

Oh, one last thing, you can customise this bar to remove the Undo button... oops!