To me, buttons and icons provide the visual cue that “clicking here does something”, without having to mouse over them to discover that they’re clickable.

It’s the unadorned text strings that aren’t as obvious.

Yea, I agree that Office 2003 was the pinnacle of Office UI design. And I’d go so far as to say that about Windows 2000.

Having controls in predictable shapes and locations really contributed to “ease of use”. One of my pet peeves is the more recent trend where clickable elements aren’t obviously so. Such as a string of text that one has to hover across and see the cursor change shape to know that it’s clickable.

As others have said, I think a significant part of why the UIs have changed since then is to accommodate touch screens and “webification”.

'Glad to see your posting. I thought I was just being curmudgeonly :)

Congratulations! Bask in the glow of accomplishment, and get some well deserved rest!

Reminds me of “Demon Seed” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_Seed

The candiru swim up the urethra https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candiru_(fish)

Nice work

“This polish takes forever to dry…”

In MSSQL, you can do a BEGIN TRAN before your UPDATE statement.

Then if the number of affected rows is not about what you’d expect, doing a ROLLBACK would undo the changes.

If the number of affected rows did look about right, doing a COMMIT would make the changes permanent.

I’ve been replaying FO4 lately on console and so happy to have it now on PC to carry on trips.

This was my first non-OS Microsoft purchase.

The most fun thing I did with it was to write a “war dialer” inspired by the 1983 movie “War Games”.

It had a “graphical” screen where one could enter a telephone area code, an exchange, and starting and ending numbers, then it would command the modem to dial each number in sequence.

It would log the call results as “no answer”, “busy”, “voice”, or “data”.

Good memories…