Page 85 - PCWorld (September 2019)

menus” add-in programs such as Add In
Classic Microsoft menus Add-In programs.
users to learn new Windows and OS/2
programs because they all had similar menus,
dialog boxes, keyboard shortcuts, and so
forth. Thanks to this standard, for instance, the
key combinations of Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, and
Ctrl+V—Cut, Copy, Paste— were the same in
Word, Excel, Photoshop, Corel Paint,
Quicken, and hundreds of other programs.
And then Microsoft moved to the Ribbon
menu. So many users hated it that multiple
vendors have created “Classic Microsoft
Tools, UBit Menu, Office Classic Menu, and
more. These add-in programs have their
limitations as well, but many thousands of
users (according to my sources) say they can
live with the limitations as long as they have
the classic menus.
“I use the mouse with my right hand and
shortcut keys with my left hand without even
thinking about it,” said a colleague from Salt
Lake County. “I work twice as fast
because I’m ambidextrous on
the computer, not with anything
else, just with the keyboard and
mouse. I can’t do that with the
Ribbon menus.”
Other users have made the
same argument and swear they
will never graduate to the Ribbon,
at least, not as long as the add-in
tools are available. The software
vendors who make these add-in
tools claim they’ll keep going strong.
DATABASES: DBASE III+
AND LOTUS 1-2-3
In spite of the massive variety of databases on
the market today, dBase III+ and Lotus 1-2-3
are still widely used by a lot of home users
and small businesses. (Lotus 1-2-3 is,
technically, a spreadsheet like Excel, but
spreadsheets are technically, databases.)
The reasons provided by most of the
individuals I asked are:
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