I have a confession. Having vilified and vituperated Office 2007 for going on two years now, I have to admit (now that I have used it for a while): I like it. It was a massive paradigm change, and they could have done a better job of providing pointers to where features moved to (you have to launch help every time — why isn’t there just a search box in the Office menu that says “where’d my shit go?”). But really, the immediacy of accessing commands through the ribbon along with the pervasiveness of live preview more than makes up for it. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
HOWEVER.
Why, oh why, in this 2009th year of the current era, does Word still not recognize when a file on disk has changed to read only? And worse, let you make modifications to that file that you cannot save, except by either saving the file to a different name (and then deleting the old version of the file and renaming the new one) or copying the changes, closing and then reopening the file in write mode (and praying you don’t make a copy/paste error that sends your changes to the Big Bit Bucket in the Sky). I can’t be the only one having this problem; I’m positive I’m not the only person on the planet who keeps Word docs in source control.
Come on, Microsoft! This one is even more irritating than the Excel copy and paste thing!
Right there with you, brother.
The suddenly-read-only thing has happened to me several times in the last week. It’s a huge annoyance. I usually just save a new copy as “filenameWTF.docx” and move on.
Fortunately, I do most of my writing in plain text. Emacs never pulls this kind of malarkey on me.
Yup, VIM handles it as well. As does SlickEdit. As does Visual Studio (automagically, if you tell it to). Et cetera, ad nauseum.
Man I’m full of Latin today. Caveat emptor!