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Hi Karl,
the world moves forward also without Microsoft, and Apple, Google and other developers are changing their GUIs, and Microsoft has to do similar to not look outdated and to not loose customers.
You can be sure that they would not change anything if selling alone would be enough.
The same is true for our applications: they have to evolve to not loose customers.
Wolfgang

Yes, that's right. And one important part is the outfit of the programs. As programmers we often do not realize how grey and old-fashioned our programs can look like.

When Microsoft introduced the XP-Themes it took several years until we took a first look at them. Initially we thought that it was not worth to enable them, also because of the additional CPU consumption. Now when looking at some rare installations where themes are not enabled, the programs look awfully old and ugly.

I must admit that I am always years behind main stream fashion when I am looking at many GUI changes as Icons and colors. But many more people see the world differently.

Arne

Hello Arne, Terry,

ArneOrtlinghaus wrote: I must admit that I am always years behind main stream fashion when I am looking at many GUI changes as Icons and colors. But many more people see the world differently.

Then you're probably just in time to catch up with the latest Microsoft change as they changed from colorful to boring black on white back to colorful.

I followed a few sessions of Microsoft Ignite. Technically this Ignite was disaster and if it did anything with my perception of Microsoft then it is that it confirmed that Microsoft is mainly spending time & money on look & feel which apparently need to be changed every year while reliability and functionality are less and less important. I missed sessions because I could not log in (clicking Microsoft account have a page with "Bad request" and directly entering my -correct- credentials gave a invalid combination of username & password which it wasn't, showing that Microsoft can't even handle proper messaging on a website. I was also unable to attend one meeting as connecting said Sorry we couldn't connect you. Why not?

I am absolutely not against adapting graphic design from time to time. But not before issues are fixed, instead of created like Microsoft is doing.

Dick

ArneOrtlinghaus wrote:... As programmers we often do not realize how grey and old-fashioned our programs can look like...

Well, let me tell you, from a POV of a user, who has to get his share of workload delivered every evening - i don't give a damn for whatever fancy color, round or flat or 3D Button is en vogue.
For the last 6 months I have had a second job helping my wife's office through a "working software" conversion. Unfortunately, the developers relied on Word as the front end. With the last update, they forcibly switched from W2003 to 2016. Overnight, about 5000 text modules, which had been networked in an elaborate system over the last 20 years, were non-functional. Automatic migration to whatever MS invented as a replacement - nada. Working speed of the employees, who can't type their menu shortcuts blindly anymore, halved, because now "Ribbon" is (was) fashion. At the same time, it was decided that no one needs reasonably visible window borders, so now 5 windows lie white on white overlapping, you click yourself a wolf and after 8 hours you can no longer look straight ahead. New functionality? Nothing at all. But Word hangs regularly if you work with several documents at the same time for more than 5 minutes. Great, really. /rant off

Hello Karl,

Your users may benefit from the Classic Menu for Office 2010-2019, see https://www.officeclassicmenu.com/en/index.php. It's not free but worth the small fee. It appears as an extra tab Classic menu in the Ribbon. Unfortunately, you can't use the shortcut keys either as you were able in earlier versions of Office. But the Ribbon has shortcut keys too, though different and illogical.

I use it like the Classic XP menu in Windows 10: most options I can find fast enough in the W10 menu resp. Office Ribbon but some choices I find faster by browsing through the menu's. E.g. in W10 when I want to start a rarely used utility from which I don't know the name then in W10 I have to open every folder in the All apps menu while in the XP menu I quickly move my mouse through some locations which auto open.

Microsoft is champion in making things more cumbersome, and worse, taking away an existing (and still working) option which should be a user's choice.

I was not aware that there were compatibility issues too; Office 2003 made documents seem to open just as well in Office 2016.

Dick

According to programmer comments there is no special GUID for Windows 11 and for programs the new Windows is always version 10! But with the following syntax it should be possible to know the version when using "GetVersionEx". On my computer it works at least.

method GetWindowsVersion()
local sOS is _WINOSVERSIONINFO
local c as string
sOS.dwOSVersionInfoSize := dword(_sizeof(_WINOSVERSIONINFO))
GetVersionEx(@sOS)
c := NTrimSafe(sOS.dwMajorVersion)+"."+ NTrimSafe(sOS.dwMinorVersion)
// Windows 11: dwMajorVersion == 10 && dwMinorVersion == 0 && dwBuildNumber >= 22000
if sOS.dwMajorVersion == 10 .and. sOS.dwMinorVersion == 0 .and. sOS.dwBuildNumber >= 22000
c := "11.0"
endif
c += " ("+NtrimSafe(sOS.dwBuildNumber)+")"
return c

Hi Arne,
in fact that is the only possbility and I use this to recognize Windows 11 inmy software.
Wolfgang