Microsoft vs. Users
I thought we had moved on from stuff like this, but no. Count on Microsoft to kick it old school.
Microsoft recently patched Office 2008 (the Mac version of office). All well and good, but a side effect of this patch is that all .doc and .xls files created on a Windows box can’t be opened by double-clicking them on a mac. Double-clicking those files (which for us mac users, is most files) opens Word just fine, but to a new blank document that Word has merrily assumed you wanted to create because as far as it can tell you’ve just started the program on its own.
So, there that is. Imagine you are a mac user working in an office environment. You are probably surrounded by PC users and you are probably used to getting lots of emailed word documents from them or from the web. Now, instead of just quickly getting content by double-clicking that unfortunate plethora of word documents, you have to save the document somewhere on your disk and then use the file/open dialog to open it.
As if that weren’t bad enough, Microsoft and its apologists are coming out and saying that this (wait for it) isn’t a bug, but a feature!
This is not an error. Various file types have been disabled by design.
I am sure more will be removed in future updates.
This is a security measure, it was intentional, and there’s no chance it will be changed.
—Comment by John McGhie in PROBLEM: 12.1 version of Word 2008 will not open WinWord .doc files?
While in general I am not in favor of added inconvenience, I strongly feel that if someone using computers doesn’t know that when double-click doesn’t work, they should try another method such as File | Open, then they will really benefit by the lesson in basic computer literacy that MS has forced on them. Learning where attachments and downloads are stored on the hard drive is a slightly more advanced but equally beneficial lesson in computer literacy. In the long run, more computer literacy in the general population will benefit the whole world.
—Comment by Daiya Mitchell in PROBLEM: 12.1 version of Word 2008 will not open WinWord .doc files?
I can see the tagline now: “Microsoft. Saving the world one inconvience at a time.”
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