I am using MS Office Pro Plus 2013 in a Win7 desktop environment. I work with two high-res monitors. Depending on what I am working on, I may have half a dozen (or more) applications open at the same time, along with various folders of data files.
One thing that continually annoys me about Office 2013 is that it does not use the current Windows 7 theme colors. It does it's own thing. I recently discovered that it has its own themes. There are buried either under "Accounts" in Excel or "Settings" in Outlook and Word and they are global across all Office apps. Basically, you have 3 choices, "white" (the default) "light grey" and "dark grey".
The problem is that these low contrast, monochromatic color schemes make it very difficult to work with overlapping windows. It is very difficult, for example, to find the thumb slider on overlapping windows. When a window has the focus, the header bar does not change color (only the title text in the title bar goes black from grey). Setting the Office theme to Dark Grey helps a bit, but not much.
So, new applications from MS are written to ignore Windows 7 global settings for theme colors etc. A similar situation exists in the Windows 10 system, where you can't set a color for the title bar at all (at least, not the last time that I looked, but I heard a rumor that this might be changed).
I kept wondering, why is this? Then I noticed that our new hires use their desktops differently than we of a previous generation do. They often have every window default to opening full screen. Then they toggle between them. This seems very inefficient to me, but I guess that I understand why. It is because they are used to mobility devices where they can only see a single app and a fragment of data at a time. Maybe they feel overwhelmed by multiple windows being open and in view? I, on the other hand, tear my hair out when I get on one of their computers, and things like the control panel open full screen, with an acre of white space with seven icons in the middle of a 1920 x 1200 pixel screen.
The same seems to be happening with web design. Instead of seeing a page of information, everything is being distilled down a paragraph at a time, with no real sense of where you are in the larger structure of the website.
IMO, the entire point of "Windows" was the ability to have the ability to view multiple, resizable windows into the content that you were accessing, simultaneously. The higher the resolution of the monitor, the more you could have access to at a glance. Now, that model seems abandoned. The twitter universe dictates that anything longer than 255 characters is a waste of space.
This seems to be just another example of the disconnect between traditional desktop users and mobility priority design at MS. Courtesy of Hollywood (and Corning, if you seen their 'World in Glass' promos) we see a vision of computing for the future which uses wall-sized displays of information. Yet, in the real world, MS is pushing us in exactly the opposite direction. We need to be confined to a hand-held screen the size of our palms -- yet, ironically, every generation of phone gets larger and larger.
I don't get it.
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