Recent Files on Office

I have to agree that this is a very personal thing, but still, one of my favorite things in Office 2007 menus was the recent list.

You had about 20 items to choose  (up from 4), from which 9 you could access using a simple key combo. It was amazing! I saved several minutes of my day that were wasted searching for files in very deep folder trees. Moreover, that was a very nice pin feature, that allowed you to hold or pin down a certain file to that list. This made sure that the file would remain in the list even if you don't access it very frequently. In short, it was a Favorite File combined with File History.

The recent file list as of Office 2007 (picture taken from here)

And what I loved the most was the fact that I could get some files very quickly. Inside Word, for example, I'd type ALT-F, 1, and wow! That timesheet that I used everyday would be open. The great advantage of not having to search is that I didn't had to focus my mind in opening the file: it was a mechanical task. Looking for files in directories requires focus because you have to scan the folder for your file.

The problem is that, in Office 2010, which I have been using for some weeks now, the Recent list is not on the "File" menu, but on a sublevel of it. If, having something open on Word, I go ALT-F, I get:

Some names where censored on purpose

To access the Recent files list, I have to click at the Recent item on the left-side menu! Or the other hand, the features that I'm seeing here aren't really that useful. In fact, I don't recall ever using them on Word 2007. So, another tip for MS Information Architects: Verify which features are mostly used and make them more easy (direct) to access.

Another Bad UI

Microsoft is the champion of Bad UI design... mostly because MS has so many end-user softwares that are very spread. So, it's not really their fault. However, I find some mistakes more serious, mainly when we are talking about the OS. And let's remember that Windows hasn't changed a real lot in the last 15 years.

The bad design was in the Copy File box:

Names ommited due to privacy issues

It's bad enough that for some reason the file transfer had stalled. But I was copying many files, one at a time, to this destination folder. Now, one of the "Copying..." boxes was clearly telling me one of the operations have failed, but which? Where is the name of the file? When copying a file from one place to another, there are 3 informations that are crucial to the user:

1. Which file
2. From where
3. To where

(2) could be ommited if files in our HD had unique names, but since we end up naming a lot of stuff like "Todo.txt", "tasks.txt", "prices.txt", "list.txt", we need to know which of them we are talking about. Older boxes like these solved the space trouble by including additional information in a ToolTip. But in Vista, MS forgot that the filename had to appear somewhere. 

I had to start over and check each file to see if it was correctly copied.

Microsoft Project tutorial: Duration and task types

This article might be helpful for those of us that are sure there is a form of Artificial Intelligence inside Project.

Opening Visio 2007 docs in Individual Windows

I repeatedly disagree with Microsoft UI designers. Ok, they think it's nice that Visio treats many diagrams with a single instance. That I can live with. But shouldn't they enable the user to quick swap between them, maybe by using tabs, etc.?

Anyway, Visio is actually a great tool, so I'm not ready to ditch it just yet. Not surprisingly, there's a way to make sure Visio opens a new instance every time you open a new file, which results in a taskbar item for each document, which essentially mimics the effect that I desire, because it enables the user to quickly see whichs  files are open. Not surprisingly as well, the method it's obscure, requiring some tweaking with Windows registry:

1. Open Visio and go to Tools->Options, select the Advanced tab and check "Put all settings in the Windows Registry".
2. Open regedit by typing regedit in the Windows->Run interface.
3. Make a registry backup by selecting the upper node in the tree on the left panel, and selecting File->Export. Make sure to add a date to the file, so that you now how long it was since the backup was made.
4. Navigate the left tree to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Office/12.0/Visio/Application.¹
5. On the right panel, find the "SingleInstanceFileOpen" value. Double click it, and change it's data from "1" to "0".

Just one thing. This will increase memory usage by Visio, since each document now has to run a full application.

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¹ - This applies to the 2007 version of Visio. Other versions might store the value somewhere else, so if you are running something different, try Edit->Search and look for SingleInstanceFileOpen, but make sure this is a Visio value.

What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic

Nice article about float points. Too bad the reading is complex and slow, but I recommend it to every programmer out there.