[ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities plus schmooze

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty
Subject: Re: [ExI] standard form for creating a test, was: RE: humanities
plus schmooze

On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 4:14 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

>>... Written by yours truly a bit over 15 years ago.

>...I generally don't like to admit I've been doing this for so long, but
yeah... the stuff I wrote 15 years ago can't even be killed; despite 3
server upgrades and a new version that was missing one feature so the CFO
still uses the old version...

That is evidence of an excellent product Mike.  If the thing works, don't
mess with it.  Every piece of software doesn't need to be upgraded to the
new and improved version, which so often turns out to be just new.

Look at Microsloth Excel for instance.  Compare the user interface in 2010
with the 2007 version.  The older one was intuitive, logical, well designed.
The 2010 version is way more difficult to use, unless you know how to
customize the toolbars, which most users don't.  They talked us into
upgrading by a feature of Excel2010 that I desperately needed, a much higher
data handling capacity.  2007 only had 65k lines and 256 columns.  I
definitely needed the 1 million data lines Excel2010 offers, but that
interface comes with a price.

For those of us who set up scroll bars, spinners, buttons and checkboxes on
the spreadsheet need to do stuff that is far less intuitive now.  I got over
it, but I grumbled for a long time over that.

>...Our IT Director has the motto, "We don't fly anything we build"  so it's
not really mission critical like rocket science...
_______________________________________________

It isn't just rocket science.  When a major interface redesign comes along,
big companies have enoooooormous investment in collective expertise of its
employees in the old system.  Most of that investment is lost in a major
interface configuration change.  

This would make a huge market for a software tool that probably exists
somewhere: a routine that takes Excel 2010 and makes the interface look
identical to the 2007 interface, but with more rows and columns of data
available.  I love those, still don't like the 2010 interface three years
later.  I never disliked any of the previous version changes.

I have learned from my previous go-around with the test template software
question: if I can think of *anything* that would be cool to have, someone
somewhere has done it a long time ago and has done an excellent job.  Good
chance it is available free online somewhere.

spike