Re:Death to MS Word
by mturmon on Thursday April 12, 2012 @01:11AM
(#3831128)
"Second, the Track Changes feature is awesome."
I'd say that the track changes feature has a core of awesome that is made ugly by a really bad UX.
The worst case is making a bunch of fine-grained changes to a page -- say, a collaborator with poor grammar. Each change shows up with its own fat bubble explaining who made the change and when. You do, as claimed in TFA, end up looking like an anal-retentive a-hole (e.g., switching commas inside quotes 10 times per page results in 10 fat bubbles explaining each change). I simply don't do fine-grained edits with Track Changes on, because I can't bear to see order of 50 change bubbles per page.
Another problem with the track changes UX is iterated changes. You make a change, and then a change to that change (e.g., reword twice). Each one produces a bubble. Eventually you can't tell what the hell is going on. The owner of the document can choose to accept the changes piecemeal, which could result in chaos. You spend more effort trying to engineer a minimal set of changes than thinking about the content of the change.
I'd say that the track changes feature has a core of awesome that is made ugly by a really bad UX.
The worst case is making a bunch of fine-grained changes to a page -- say, a collaborator with poor grammar. Each change shows up with its own fat bubble explaining who made the change and when. You do, as claimed in TFA, end up looking like an anal-retentive a-hole (e.g., switching commas inside quotes 10 times per page results in 10 fat bubbles explaining each change). I simply don't do fine-grained edits with Track Changes on, because I can't bear to see order of 50 change bubbles per page.
Another problem with the track changes UX is iterated changes. You make a change, and then a change to that change (e.g., reword twice). Each one produces a bubble. Eventually you can't tell what the hell is going on. The owner of the document can choose to accept the changes piecemeal, which could result in chaos. You spend more effort trying to engineer a minimal set of changes than thinking about the content of the change.