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Posted on July 24th, 2012 by Tim Danton
There’s something funny in Microsoft Office 2013!
Microsoft Office is one of those products that takes itself very seriously. If it were a person, it would wear a starched shirt and refer to its father as “sir”. So imagine my shock when I found a feature in Office 2013 that could, at a stretch, be described as a funny.
To see it for yourself, launch Word 2013, choose the Insert tab and hover over the Shapes button. You’ll see this:
Okay, it isn’t going to pick up a gong at the Productivity Software Of The Year Comedy awards, but have you seen anything even resembling mild humour in a Microsoft Office product before?
Tags: Office 2013, Word 2013
Posted in: Software
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16 Responses to “ There’s something funny in Microsoft Office 2013! ”
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July 24th, 2012 at 6:34 pm
Some would say Clippy was the biggest joke Microsoft ever put into Office, but I don’t think that’s quite what you meant…
July 24th, 2012 at 6:56 pm
How about the Word 95 tip of the day ‘You can hurt yourself if you run with scissors’?
Actually, no. Not funny or humourous.
July 24th, 2012 at 7:30 pm
Looks like an uncaught “feature”. Either that or MS is trying to reinvent itself as Google. Not sure that the “Office Assistant” paper-clip could be described as particularly serious though.
July 24th, 2012 at 7:45 pm
The dog from Windows XP.
Jon Honeyball pointed out that a cartoon dog doing tricks has no place in a ‘professional’ operating system. Can’t be bothered to hunt it down, it was s few years ago.
July 24th, 2012 at 11:27 pm
How about all those easter eggs… Flight Sims, pinball…?
July 25th, 2012 at 9:52 am
There have been a lot of “chatty” makeovers to the messages which can grate rather and Office 2013 now refers to itself as “We” as though it was the queen. As in “We can’t find anything to display here.”
July 25th, 2012 at 10:08 am
@Simon – I don’t object to the chatty language as a whole… yet. It’s one of those things that could get annoying after, say, three years.
@Mark – well, that did make me laugh. But then I’m easily amused.
July 26th, 2012 at 6:51 am
Yes, I used to laugh at the scissors advice, too. I reckon it was an easter egg that escaped into production.
July 26th, 2012 at 1:56 pm
I can imagine it’s one of those things where, after days and weeks of slaving away at getting the software out to a strict deadline, someone needed to loosen up and did so by sneaking in a bit of not-really-scoped text. Good on you, whoever you are
July 26th, 2012 at 3:18 pm
How about Excel’s belief that the world began on 1.1.1900, so it is not acceptable to have a date before that?
July 26th, 2012 at 3:40 pm
Hmmm the one I remember (oddly enough!) is:
Plaid shirts and striped pants rarely make a positive fashion statement.
That was a few years ago!
July 26th, 2012 at 4:26 pm
Steve Balmer – The real joker in the Microsoft Deck, and the Stooge to the domination of accountancy over software substance…
July 27th, 2012 at 12:04 am
There are other examples too, such as adding “You’re good to go” to the spell checker completion dialog. I think it is a deliberate design strategy to soften and ‘humanise’ the interface as I think after touch, focus will be placed on voice input, so giving the software ‘personality’ is a step along that path. I used to love the MS Agent characters for creating educational materials and teaching kids the basics of programming so it’s a shame some of the tools are no longer supported.
July 28th, 2012 at 4:48 am
Or in Excel dont have more than
9,999,999,999,999.99
or it starts rounding it up for you, fortunately you have to be a pretty big company to have this much.
August 1st, 2012 at 9:47 am
The Hotmail connector was seen as funny by those who didn’t get that MS owned hotmail. Office 2010 being able to open ODF docs made me happy….not really a laugh though. I think what is funny is that the design is one that will age fast….
August 1st, 2012 at 9:48 am
The Hotmail connector was seen as funny by those who didn’t get that MS owned hotmail. Office 2010 being able to open ODF docs made me happy….not really a laugh though.