I'm just looking for a place to vent. I ran into another feature in Office 2013 that was probably designed and implemented by a well-meaning product team, but just makes my life harder. The scroll buttons on the scroll bar in Word 2013 disable themselves after a few seconds of no mouse movement. That feature was probably meant to protect me from somehow accidentally clicking a scroll bar button when I didn't mean to, but unfortunately, it keeps me from clicking the scroll buttons when I do mean to. When reading a long document on my laptop, I can't just leave the mouse on the scroll button and click it to scroll. The button disables and forces me to move the mouse a few pixels before it re-enables and lets me click it. Office team: Please don't assume I'm not capable of operating my computer. That's insulting.
Here's another of your features that makes my life harder: When an Office document isn't current, clicking on it makes it current, but otherwise the mouse click is ignored. In every other Windows app, clicking on a button or other control in an app that isn't current selects the app and activates the control. Try it. Run Calculator, notepad, or any other application. Click a different app, then click a button in the first app. That first app becomes current and the button clicks. Now try it in Office. The button doesn't click. In Windows 7 and Windows 8 it's hard to tell if an app is current or not, so every time I need to click a button in Office, I click, wait to see if anything happens, and then click again. Now I'm getting in the habit of always double-clicking Outlook controls in the hope that it will stop ignoring what I tell it to do.
Office team: The Windows team actually does do User Experience research. They have done a great job of designing UI (at least until Windows 8). Don't redesign their user experience. Or, if you just can't help yourself, give me an option to turn off your silliness and make the experience like the rest of Windows. Of the 2000 or so options in Office 2013, you didn't provide options to disable either of these annoying UI features. Shame on you.
Thanks. I feel better after venting.