Color Me Unimpressed.

So it's been a month or so since I upgraded to MS Office 2007. Seeing as how I live and breathe MS Word and Excel, I have little tolerance for crappy interfaces, stupid glitches, and overall usability fail. To my great delight (spoken through clenched teeth), MS Office 2007 has plenty of the above.

Don't get me wrong. The new Office has a few things I like. For example, it doesn't freeze every other time I open a document. No, it freezes pretty much every time I open a document. Hooray for consistency!

Okay, okay, in all seriousness, for the most part, Word and Excel function well enough. Most of the problems I've encountered don't interfere too much with my productivity, they just annoy me. Some of them make my OCD crackle, others make me want to set myself on fire, but in general, they just make me grit my teeth and say bad words.

For example, MS Word seems to have it in its tiny little microprocessor brain that I prefer to have a space between all of my paragraphs. No matter how many times I change the default setting, I have to change it every. fucking. time. Attn: MS Word - When the following is on the screen...
...and I hit the "change default" button, don't let me see THIS when I start the next document:
Is that really too much to ask??? REALLY??? *takes medication*

Moving on.

Apparently MS Word is looking to be more "hip" and, in keeping with today's teenagers, has adopted a stance of "slightly less literate than the previous generation".

For example:

Um, guys? Do I have to say it?

Further, and perhaps this is just the version I got, but the thesaurus function is performing at a slightly subpar level:
Using the medium of Photoshop, I took the liberty of correcting the problem:

There. Sorted.

Now, one last issue is more of an OCD thing, and was resolved by way of changing the default settings, but I'm just curious who at Microsoft thought that it made sense to change the default font from Times New Roman, size 10 - which it has been since the dawn of time (seriously, even cave paintings are done in TNR 10) - to this?
Was somebody in the font department trying to justify their job, or what? I mean, seriously. TNR and Courier New are pretty much standard fonts. Maybe Arial. But TNR is everywhere. Why fuck with what works??

Why, indeed, Microsoft?

*booming voice coming from the general direction of Redmond, WA*:

BECAUSE WE ARE MICROSOFT, AND WE CAN.

In closing, I am decidedly unimpressed by Office 2007 and am wondering precisely why I was compelled to abandon Office 2003, which worked quite nicely.

Speaking of things I am unimpressed with, one thing definitely does not fall into that category, and that's Scarlett's current WIP, Plus One. Her male main character - especially after the chapter she just completed - epically PWNs everything she's ever written. Seriously.

So, to recap:

Scarlett, Plus One, and the main character therein: WIN
Microsoft, Office 2007, and the programs therein: FAIL