The Dynamic Duo

I have a lot of posts that I’d like to make that I consider so much more important and worthwhile than this one, but I’m lucky enough to be really busy with current client work and generating proposals for new potential clients, and just haven’t been able to figure make the time for them yet. So you’ll get this question and usability gripe instead, and you’ll like it or at least I’ll pretend that you do.

I just opened up the Microsoft Office help on my mac to read up on templates, and the font choice is pretty ugly (I love those two words in combination) as well as being pretty small and tough on the eyes to read. Microsoft Office’s help doesn’t seem to use the built in Mac Help viewer and there isn’t any immediately evident way to change the font or font size. Since probably the only reason you’d open help is to troubleshoot something or research how to do something it follows that you’ll be doing at least a little bit of reading. Word being a document editing and layout application it seems pretty stupid to me that, if they are going to use their own help viewer, they wouldn’t give an easy and immediately obvious (using the same type of interface as the main application even) way of changing the display font and font size. I’m sure there is probably a preference setting or something to do it, but I’m in the help to find out how to solve a problem, not to get new problems to solve.

I’m also curious about their choice to not use the default help viewer. If I remember correctly, and I think I do, the Windows version uses the default Windows help viewer. I’m guessing that this is probably due at least in part to a rush to bring Microsoft Office to Mac Os X which had to have been a pretty major undertaking. Maybe later versions of Mac Office fix this or use the default viewer (I’m using Office X). Anybody know?