Why I Found Microsoft Office So Jarring

Like a lot of people. I was brought up on Microsoft Office: Word, Powerpoint, etc. You did what you needed to do, save it to your computer, and if you wanted to take it elsewhere you copied it onto a pendrive or disc, and haphazardly left it on a train for a journalist to find. But throughout the process your files were very much in your possession. I had a whole childhood and adolescence where that was the model.

Then at some point last decade the upgraded versions of the same office products you’d been using starting taking your files from you, from your computer that you were working on the in, and storing them off “somewhere in the cloud”.

Contrast this to Google’s equivalent products. I make casual use of them for personal stuff: speadsheeting holiday expenses, etc. I’ve always used them through the browser and the model is more like: I go to the cloud, work on my files, then leave them there in my little bit of the cloud and they never leave there.

An analogy I find is: imagine that your doing an office job before we had all these computery things. Say you had a workflow you were fairly content with: You had your desk, you took your files out of a draw, worked on them, then put them back in. Then one you’re sitting at your desk working on a file, but now when you’re done someone comes along and says “I’ll put that away for you”. “But where are you putting it?” you ask. “Oh don’t worry about that” they reply, “just let me know when you want it back”. But then after they take it, the file is still somehow there in your desk draw…

Confusion and fear would understandably ensue.

My experience of Microsoft 365 (I think is what they call it when things are stored off in the cloud) is continuous second guessing about what’s on my computer, what’s in the cloud, or both. This is largely driven by the fact we’re still using the same desktop applications that we were brought up with and are built around the model that your files are on your computer. There are other issues I’ve encountered around syncing, and locking which could be put down to implementation quality. But I’ve never been that confident conceptually with what’s going on.

Good usable design of products, physical and software, helps the user to form a good mental model of how it works that stays true to it’s behaviour. You don’t have to know how it really works, but you need a model which you base your usage of the product on, and that needs to manifest the same outcomes and the true implementation.

With the Google office products the mental model is one of going to your bit of the cloud through your browser, doing what you need to do, then leaving your bit of the cloud, happy that your files will be there when you come back. I never find myself worrying.

The good news is: I’m writing this blog post a few years too late. These days I don’t have to deal with that many Word Documents or Powerpoints, and the entirely online, in the browser, version of Microsoft Office is useable enough for my purposes. I also don’t run Windows locally these days. But in the past when I did, and the browser native version of office was fairly unusable, I inevitably found myself using the desktop Office applications and was in this constant state of unease.