I loved most of Office 2000's apps. I think Excel and Word, primarily, are two top-notch software applications. For the last half-year I've been "saddled" with Office 2002 on my work laptop and I must say that I don't like some of the new features/enhancements they've added. I'm not sure if it's just me being too lazy/scared of new features to try and adapt/understand or if it's genuinely just some poor design on Microsoft's part. Or maybe the world (read: "Motorola work culture") is just not ready for some of these changes? For instance, I had saved a certain document "FRDD_R17_4799A.doc" to my desktop. Recently I received an update to the document from the author in an email. When I double-click that attachment in Outlook, it asks me "Do you want to merge changes in FRDD-R17_4799A.doc to d:\profiles\jschill1\desktop\FRDD-R17_4799A.doc?". At first this feature might sound like a good idea, but there are a flurry of emails going around on this document. What if multiple authors have sent me 4 updates in the last two days and I've only opened one or two of them and I only merged one? Do I trust Word to merge everything correctly? My general answer to this has been "No! Just let me see the document Joe Blow sent me and judge for myself you sack of crap!". Or something to that effect. Obviously if our work culture was such that the document was stored online somewhere and version controlled then this wouldn't be such an issue (and generally they are once checked-in but this is a working document at the moment that hasn't been entered). Worst is that I can't seem to find in Outlook 2002 where this option is but I guess I didn't look hard enough. I've always thought that Outlook's Options dialogs were among some of the worst I've ever seen. Case in point: Under Tools > Options menu item, I have "Mail Setup", "Mail Format" tabs, but I also have a "Preferences" tab which includes an "Email" section that has an "Email Options" button leading me to a totally different dialog box! WTF? Another example is the confusing Revision/Change tracking in Word 2002. Here's an example: the document version was 5.1, but the latest version sent out is 6.1. On the title page, it will say 6.1 with the 6 underlined in red. Then a red bubble off to the side of the page will be pointing a red line all the way across my document to the number 6 and inside the bubble it says "Deleted: 5". Is this truly necessary? Is this red bubble and lines cluttering up everywhere really better than the struck out text 5? A worst case is a new paragraph was added with a numbered heading. The entire section is red and underlined and the red bubble off to the side says: "Formatted: Outline numbered + Level:3 + Numbering Style: 1,2,3,... + Startat: 1 + Alignment: Left + Aligned at: 0" + Tab after: 0.5" + Indent at: 0.5" Why do I need to see all that when I'm reading the document? Worse, since the new numbered section was inserted into the document, all subsequent sections that had numbers are updated with their own bubbles that say "Formatted: Bullets and Numbering" for the rest of the entire document. Again, this just may be a sign of me unwilling to adapt but I find myself more and more wishing I just had Office 2000 installed or I could turn off all these features. Of course I know that I can probably disable any feature I don't like, but the application's settings dialogs have become too dizzying sometimes. Anyway, because I'm writing this out and bitching I decided to go into the Tools > Options menu item and find out how to turn it off. Go to the "Track Changes" tab and uncheck "Use balloons in Print and Web Layout". There, annoying bubbles now gone and I can justify putting this rant under "Tech Tips". Thoughts? Regards, Jeff