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You don't have to "delete" the new document before you open the existing document. Just go ahead and choose File > Open... and the empty document will be replaced with whatever document you open. That's a bit of non-standard behavior on Microsoft's part, but one that many applications (including TextEdit) share.

Opening a new blank document at launch is standard behavior for all Mac applications, however. And under OS X, it's also standard behavior to open a blank document (if one was not already open) when the dock icon is clicked while the application is already running.

This post has been edited by technologist: 22 November 2010 - 07:50 AM

Command + alt +shift + v will paste without formatting. Meaning you will paste with the current format of the document.

I'm getting sick and tired of those who touts the benefit of the ribbon. Yes...it's good if you have an iMac or use a large display. However, notebook displays continue to lose vertical pixels in favor of horizontal pixels (11" MacBook Air). The ribbon eats far too many vertical pixels.

There needs to be more attention by software developers on their user interfaces in terms of the lost vertical pixels.

You wrote: "But the Ribbon has evolved; many (including some Macworld editors) have grown to like it. Don't be too quick to turn back the clock."

Please lay off the "it's the future, learn to live with it" line. Clocks should be set to the proper time, even if that means turning them back. The same is true of a UI. Keep the good even if it is old, get rid of the bad even if it is new.

Don't forget that we are dealing with Microsoft, inventor of Clippy and that silly Classic Mac chatterbox. Did we grow to like them? No, we got Microsoft to abandon what was, from the start, an irritatingly stupid idea. The same is true of the Ribbon. Heck, the same is true of the entire, bloated, ill-designed Word UI. When I use Word, I sometimes feel Microsoft is peering over my shoulder. Things I do often, they make hard to do. Things I rarely do, they make prominent. Why is this so?

My own suspicion, one that came to me after talking about the Ribbon with someone quite high up at Microsoft, is that Office's bad UI may be a deliberate design decision. I came to realize that when I could see that he didn't seem to care if other software developers adopted the Ribbon interface. "Why was that?" I asked myself. If it is a good idea, then Microsoft should want it to spread.

Then I had a disturbing thought. Perhaps Microsoft knows that if people adapt to a bad UI, they're ill-suited for any other, even it is better. The Ribbon may be a bad idea, but if you grow accustomed to it, as some MacWorld editors have, then a better UI won't seem to be better. It will just be uncomfortably different. You'll flee back to the "comfort" of that ribbon like a drug addict returning to his stash.

So I guess Word 2011 does not take the 'suck' out of Word.

I'll stick with Pages on the Mac, thanks. And when I don't use pages, I have Storyist. Both of which are light years ahead of Word for the tasks they are designed to do.

For the record, I use Word 2007 on a daily basis as part of my job. Not by choice. If it were up to me, I'd use FrameMaker. And if I couldn't use FrameMaker, I'd use WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.

Until Word (Mac or PC) lets me design my own numbered lists from scratch (ala Frame), it simply doesn't fit my requirements. And I don't mean with complex macros and programming. Simple paragraph styles.

This vent is brought to you by years of frustration with numbered lists that simply don't work, don't listen, think they know best, change formats, without warning effect the entire document, etc.

I don't see any of the claimed better performance of Office 2011 over 2008. Still takes a long time to start up. Ribbon is OK, I will get used to it.

Vertical screen real estate is an issue on my laptop (13" Macbook), but use of MercuryMover for quick, keyboard-activated window resizes helps out a lot.

The new blank document thing is my biggest complaint and always has been, regardless of who is responsible for it.

The paste and match style option can be implemented with an Applescript. I've had this on the computer for a long time:

http://word.mvps.org...astetextas.html

The feature that makes Word essential for me is Autonum. I write documents in which it is essential to sequentially number cells in a table. This does it automatically, and automatically renumbers anything when I have to delete or add something in the middle.

MikeWalker, on 22 November 2010 - 08:16 AM, said:

Mike Walker, see if this helps. It's reported to.
http://www.shaunakel...enumbering.html

Re bookfold, I'd think the article could point people at CocoaBooklet and other utilities that worked very well with Word 2008 and presumably still work.

Does Command F work to find things as in any other Mac application?

Is it possible to set paste plain text (no styles) by default?

Is it possible to select text and then set the dictionary for the spell checker for it jus clicking a button in the toolbar (or similar, like using a keyboard command). That is great when having to spell check when having two languages in the same document.

Thanks.

Inkling, on 22 November 2010 - 08:10 AM, said:

Our point is: Try it before you decide to get rid of it. We were skeptical about the Ribbon at first, too, but some of us have grown to like it.

You want an FAQ, how about this? I've used Word 11 twice now and both times Norton Antivirus 11.1.1 has perceived Word autosave as a virus and quarantined the doc. Then Word says it's encountered a loss of data connection and has to close. There's no way to save the work I've done on the doc. I don't know who is to blame, Norton or Microsoft, but I'd warn people not to use one product with the other.

Macworld, on 22 November 2010 - 07:01 AM, said:

This is exactly as it should be. I would not expect Windows-only technologies to be supported in VBA on the Mac, but all else should have 100% feature parity..

A little off topic but anyone know how to move a row in an iWork Pages table? Easy as pie in Word - just select, grab, and move. Can't for the life of me figure it out in Pages. I googled it too, but to no avail.

Will Office 2011 open old Word 5.1 docs simply by double-clicking them? That worked fine with versions of Word up to Word 2004, but Word 2008 insists that I go via its Open dialog, which is tiresome.

This is supposedly a security feature, but Word 2008 doesn't give me the option of deciding whether I need/want this 'feature' or not - and it's extremely disruptive...