Ctrl+S gives you a document where the biggest UI element is a box labelled "Choose a location". Clicking on it shows a bunch of locations on my PC (such as my local documents folder) and has a button that says "More Locations".
This "More Locations" button takes you to the same Save As dialog that you would get to from clicking on File -> Save As, same as in every program of the last 30 years. In its left menu it has two giant buttons for "This PC" and "Browse".
What part wasn't obvious to you?
If you're talking about the web apps (who aren't designed for editing local files), File -> Save As has a button called "Save a Copy" that explicitly says right below that "Download a copy to your computer"
They've designed it in a way that makes my brain go into ad-mode, which basically filters half of the interface until I'm really paying attention to and go through it several times
The trick I’ve found with the ribbon is to anchor against the labels at the bottoms of each grouping. Why they’re at the bottom and not the top, I can’t say, but those labels help me scan if I start from them.
For mouse users, getting to the Save As dialog is actually three clicks in recent versions of Word. F12 is just so much more convenient.
The overlap of "users still using Microsoft Office" and "users using local storage" declines with each passing day. IT admins don't want data outside their retention policy/access logging/subject to user hardware failure, and anyone who thinks cloud storage is a malicious big tech plot left the Microsoft ecosystem years ago.
Alternatively, you could mouse over and click file -> save as or press Alt -> f -> a.
Using your method:
1. Make a new spreadhseet, press CTRL+S
2. Get some super limited menu with few last locations -> doesnt include any of the locations I need
3. Click on random location, ten you have to go down and choose "more locations" -> again doesnt have any of the locations I need, neither on shared drive or local computer; at least there is a shortcut to desktop (in the past it wasnt there since they were pushing cloud even more)
4. The next menu shows you more locations - but still not the new location that you want, so you have to find "browse" button.
Why not press F12 and get a browse button?
Maybe at your work you have one spreadsheet or one PDF, but I often have few open. I also dont even mention the problem of interlinked files (especially Excel files) and Sharepoint, where the folder address become impossible to work with.
You literally cannot even complete a fresh windows 11 install without a live internet connection now, if you're an ordinary non technical end user. It demands to be connected to some form of wired network or wireless with internet access to report home to microsoft and make a cloud based account.
They clearly decided that getting people to sign up for a forever-recurring monthly paid cloud service plan in perpetuity was the best way to go for revenue. Or at least bait them into it by methods like "oh, here's your free 5GB onedrive account, you can totally back up your whole system and use onedrive for everything. What's that, you're out of storage space on your free account? Sign up now for this $12/month account for (some_large_number_of_GB)!"
I like to think that some PM at Microsoft got promoted and brags about how one of those is 'their' button.
Is Office(CurrentYear) easier to use than 1997?
I think I copied everything to my local disk as well, but it’s 20 years of my life, so I’m disinclined from finally trashing all those various services.
Nah, won't even happen when I'm dead or about dead, or by the time I'm dead.
Also for MS-DOS, the BRIEF editor for programmers used tiling windows and (optionally) a menu-driven interface that was better designed than that of most later text editors. It also allowed the redefinition of what happens when any key on the keyboard is pressed. The default action of inserting in the text the associated character could be replaced by an arbitrary script, which made easy the implementation of things like auto-completion or syntax coloring.
Nevertheless, even if some important applications in Windows 95 were still regressions from the point of the user interface in comparison with what was available for MS-DOS, Windows 95 looked much nicer than anything using the standard VGA text modes and it was the version to which I have switched from MS-DOS.
Even if I had previously tried Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11, those had felt too much like useless toys, in comparison with the professional programs that I was using under MS-DOS. The Windows 95 taskbar was definitely a very important improvement over Windows 3.x.
I think a lot of us came of age during that time, and as such see it as the ultimate UI.
[EDIT] The move away from native toolkits and to very-custom UI for everything is also plainly bad. Java and Flash got the ball rolling on that (and both rightly caught shit for it) but Webtech junk is what really made that awful pattern take off. "Corporate really wants to make sure our checkbox elements are on-brand" OH MY GOD what an incredible waste of money, when you consider the total cost to the industry as a whole, in order to make UIs worse.
It came as quite an eye-opener to me recently to realise younger people now entering the workforce view the mouse as an archaic input device.
I was looking at Reddit the other day, on one of those r/flippingamazing type subs, and someone posted a picture of a disassembled mechanical mouse, to show off the wonders of 1900s engineering. I tell you I nearly spat out my false teeth. Had to take a Geritol to calm myself down.
(* They're more correctly called opto-mechanical since the movement sensing is done by way of a slotted disc interrupting light beams.)
I'm half-joking. I know what you mean, but I think a larger picture is that touch-interfaces have their own problems/solutions that the traditional Desktop doesn't have, and vice versa. I think that the desire to have One-Interface-To-Rule-Them-All leaves a lot of people (and possibilities) behind.
It would be a lot of work, but I think Microsoft needs two entirely separate Desktop Environments. One for touch-based devices, one for Desktop. I'm not holding my breath, we've been debating this since Windows 8. And I'm fully aware that as a middle-aged Windows Application developer that my opinion matters less with every year that passes... but I can't help but feel that maybe we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
While some people might see Win95 as a good GUI because that is what they first learned, that doesn't mean that applies to everyone. And if nothing else it also works the other way around - "kids these days" may not mind navigating around flat touch-based interfaces because they've spent the time to learn them, not because of any inherent superiority of said interfaces.
This is why IMO using how easy kids can use/learn something (in computers at least), be it UIs, languages or whatever isn't very helpful - kids have a ton of time and if they like something they can spend ages on it regardless of any inherent properties of that something. I mean, consider the downright atrocious UX the overwhelming majority of games had in home computers from the 80s and PCs until early 90s - and yet kids at the time spent hours deciphering and playing them. That didn't mean the games actually had good UIs, it meant kids had enough time and motivation to work around these UIs so they can enjoy the games.
I wouldn't be surprised if when we were kids, there were older people saying just how bloated and inefficient Windows 95's UI was, with all the mouse clicking and things hidden behind menus, etc etc...
They might end up having issues adapting to desktop enterprise UI when they enter workforce, but that's another story.
But you can't really "try out all the gestures", because the gestures themselves are largely ad hoc, and new ones get invented all the time. If you know in advance that e.g. three-finger swipe or swiping from beyond the edge of the screen are valid gestures, you can try them to see what they do; but how do you know that in advance, unless you have used (or at least heard of) a device utilizing some particular gesture?
More importantly, they're in a school system - meeting with other kids their age 5+ days a week, and sharing their discoveries with each other. It takes one kid to figure a new interaction out for the knowledge to quickly spread.
Adults tend to have a slower-working gossip network, plus there's more of an associated stigma (or at least the fear of it) of being seen as the dummy who can't figure things out.
IMO it's far worse when the cow paths are so heavily paved you have to pay tolls to access anything else. Or even explicitly hidden capabilities requiring Konami-code-esque incantations in some misguided effort to give the kids something to brag about to their friends.
I mean, I can figure it out too, but I have to agree that it’s a bit silly to get a new phone, and then immediately have to swipe up/down/left/right on every screen, starting from the extreme, starting from the center etc, to figure out what kind of hidden functionality this will reveal.
So Google Docs' word processor has fewer text editing features than Word or Office. But it has one huge enormous feature that has become, for many people, a can't-go-back-to-something-without-this dealbreaker. Does the fact that it never added the full encyclopedia of other features from 90s word processors mean that it's lacking and a huge regression, or that those features were not all that useful or appealing to many people but part of bloat resulting from how something had to go on the back of the box for Word 6, Word 95, Word 97, Word 2000, etc?
And I'd suggest kids are less "computer literate" in the sense of "understanding how the machine works" because the machines work better and they don't have to be. I used to disable extensions one by one to try to debug mystery crashes, or see if it would help free up RAM for Photoshop, in old-school Mac OS... so I had to learn some of the underpinnings... but if I don't have to do that anymore, that tells me the industry has progressed, not regressed.
Except Google Docs probably has ten times the resources compared to the Word Perfect team back in the day. Why can't they do both?
> Does the fact that it never added the full encyclopedia of other features from 90s word processors mean that it's lacking and a huge regression, or that those features were not all that useful or appealing to many people but part of bloat resulting from how something had to go on the back of the box for Word 6, Word 95, Word 97, Word 2000, etc?
I suspect it's more that consumers are cheap and building ad-supported crapware is more profitable than building real software. It's the same as how inkjet printers are total garbage today, but you can get one for $59.
> And I'd suggest kids are less "computer literate" in the sense of "understanding how the machine works" because the machines work better and they don't have to be.
I'm not talking about "less computer literate" in the sense of "not knowing what an IRQ is or does." I mean it in the sense of "not knowing what computers are capable of doing."
To use a car analogy--people know less about cars than 30 years ago, because cars are more automated, need less maintenance, etc. But in another sense, people know just as much about what cars can do for them because cars today can do all the same things and more. Modern software, by contrast, is like replacing cars with golf carts. They're simpler, sure, but because they can't do as much, and they narrow younger people's horizons of what's possible with computers.
Oh, yes there were such people, plenty of them.
And by the way, there are still people who do the same. Except it's not just '95 but any Windows and of course they could do anything in CLI much more effectively. You probably know those under the name 'Linux fanboys'.
I've been able to make do with all the current apps I use, but the biggest change for me compared to the 90s is that I don't have the time nor curiousity to figure out what every single option in every single menu is, regardless of how it gets discovered (brute force, or youtube videos, or tutorials, or whatever-reincarnation-of-Clippy some apps use, or whatnot).
the best UIs were reactive lazily rendered node-based UIs over non destructive operations, but mostly relegated to pro content creation (movies, music).
In 2022, the idea of an average person not understanding what a mouse is for is almost inconceivable. But in 1992-1994 when "Chicago" was being developed? The majority of the planet still hadn't seen one, let alone used one. Discoverability wasn't a nice-to-have, it was paramount to Windows 95's success.
Amazingly, Gates and company realized this and put a ton of effort into UX research as a result. They could have easily dropped the ball transitioning from 3.1's GUI (think Windows 8 as a counter example), so they deserve a lot of credit for getting it right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXKEnYQu-oM
If I remember correctly, this part wasn't there in Windows 95, so presumably they decided that users mostly don't need it anymore.
Every. Single. Time.
You can put a lot more on a desktop than on a mobile screen. In the Windows 95/98 era, the standard screen size was no less than 14 inches, now it is around 6 inches, and the mouse is a much more precise instrument than your fingers. On mobile, if your app becomes complex and you don't want tiny, hard to see, hard to reach targets, you have to hide things.
Now, modern desktop apps often mirror the mobile app, even though they have a lot more space available. It makes sense, not only developing two entirely different UI is much more expensive, but it also makes harder to transfer your experience from the mobile to desktop and vice versa.
There is no easy solution, and it looks like things are starting to settle a bit, maybe a few years from now, we will see a real common design language. The problem with right slide is not the hidden screen, it is that every app seems to have a different interpretation of what to do for that gesture, if they do anything at all. If every app does the same, it will be as "obvious" as right clicking to open a context menu today.
Snapchat introduced the idea that holding down the shutter button in photo capture mode should be capturing a video. Unlike any other camera apps on mobile where video capture is a separate mode readily seen in the UI, Snapchat made it undiscoverable.
Snapchat also pioneered the idea that double tapping the viewfinder should switch cameras at a time when almost all other camera apps had dedicated buttons for doing that. Again that's undiscoverable.
There’s the obvious dark patterns when you want to nudge users, but what about all the rest where a product is supposed to sell by being more productive for the user?
However, the other thing is that you were kids. If you were a kid with that phone app, fueled by curiosity and with a drive to be the first that discovers a functionality, you would have found that extra screen in 15 mins tops.