This is one of those good news, bad news stories, and I'm feeling like I'm only six pages into of very long novel. Over the past weekend I completed a major piece of work, my first using DNS 11.5 on my new hexacore machine. Drilling down into the DNS help files, I discovered that Nuance had created a workable routine for using the Microsoft Ribbon. The good news is, from what I can tell, that it does what it is supposed to, mostly. It's not absolutely bulletproof, but then again, not much else is. Then to, I'm only into my third week of using DNS 11.5 on a regular basis, and I don't have the benefit of the three + years that I have had here at the office tweaking DNS 10. The more difficult part is having to figure out how to cut through the menu clutter. The experience is very much like downloading Google Maps driving directions that go on, and on, and on, and on... seemingly forever! When I first started using Word 2010 I try to re-create the custom toolbar that I use here at work, and with little or no success. The whole idea behind having a custom toolbar is not to have to deal with the Ribbon, the worst idea Microsoft has had since it introduced, and then withdrew, that cheesy paperclip character some years back. In some respects I feel that I've been stuck in an alternate universe where all the stuff I that I so painstakingly learned no longer works. I also experienced having some oddball things happen, like bulleting every paragraph in the paper I was writing; I don't know why, it just happened. There were a few other unexpected surprises, too.

Is there anybody out there having a similar experience?

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Art Silen

artsilen@sbcglobal.net; art.silen.mediator@gmail.com  

"Question assumptions"

DSN 11.5, running on Win7;Intel Core i7 CPU 970 @3.20 GHz; System Memory 12 GB; Graphic AMD Radcon HD6570; System Board 2A861.04E01; System Bios 6.15

Art - YES!

I had a very similar experience to yours, though my chief frustration was in working out how to migrate my autotext and autocorrect, and, having done so, discover where the hell they had gone to and how to retrieve them!

I spent HOURS fiddling around until I discovered this gem of a document:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/migrating-to-word-2010-from-word-2003-HA101850447.aspx

It helped me a lot. I hope it does the same for you.

Ed 

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DNS 12 Pro, Windows 7 Professional, SP1, i7-2700K 3.50 Ghz Sandybridge, 16Gb DDR3 PC3-160000C9 2000Mhz dual channel RAM, SpeechMike 5276 and Samson Airline 77

Thank you, Ed. Maybe with this I can get some real work done!

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Art Silen

artsilen@sbcglobal.net; art.silen.mediator@gmail.com  

"Question assumptions"

DSN 11.5, running on Win7;Intel Core i7 CPU 970 @3.20 GHz; System Memory 12 GB; Graphic AMD Radcon HD6570; System Board 2A861.04E01; System Bios 6.15

If you want to customise the ribbon then I would suggest that you look at ribboncreator2010

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Jomark

Art,

The most frustrating thing with regard to the Ribbon bar, whether you're using Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010, is that neither Microsoft nor Nuance document what is accessible via Active Accessibility (i.e., Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA)). This makes it obviously frustrating to work with the Ribbon bar.

However, 99% of anything that's in the Ribbon bar, with one or two exceptions, is fully accessible by voice command via Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA).

When working with the Ribbon bar, try mousing over any option in the Ribbon bar. The ToolTips and will give you the command name to use when accessing that feature. Simply say that command that is shown in the ToolTips. In most cases that will access that feature. Unfortunately, some of these features execute additional dialogs, which must be navigated. However, once you get used to the commands that are available for the Ribbon bar via MSAA, it actually becomes quite easy to access these features. There are only a couple of conflicts with regard to the Ribbon bar tabs. If you can't open a particular Ribbon bar, try preceding the Ribbon bar name with "click".

Having worked with Microsoft Office 2010 64-bit now for almost a year, I have gotten quite used to it and I have no problems executing Ribbon bar features and functions by voice command using the above. However, it's fairly obvious that the speech folks (WSR) for Microsoft and the Microsoft Office programmers don't really communicate with one another. On the other hand, what is very interesting is that it is very easy using WSR, most particularly in Windows 7 because the WSR implementation in Windows Vista, pardon my French, sucks. The Microsoft speech folks have obviously made Microsoft Office fully voice command capable in WSR, so it should be the same in DNS, one would think. And, in fact it is, it's just not 100% as in the case of WSR.

Chuck Runquist
Technical Project Manager
VoiceTeach LLC
Home of VoicePower®: We don't make speech recognition, we make it better!

"Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one." -  Chinese Proverb

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No, Chuck, I have a less charitable interpretation. This is anti-competitive behavior on Microsoft's part. So they've made their rinky-dink WSR fully functional in Microsoft Word 2010; how nice! And they're not willing to create a level playing field for Nuance's DNS? I thought the Microsoft antitrust litigation was supposed to eliminate all that in-house favoritism. The whole point of having speech recognition is not to have to use the mouse at all. This is precisely the reason I was so reluctant to give up my MS Word 2003 program. I do not want to have to reinvent the wheel every time I move from one functionality to the next.

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Art Silen

artsilen@sbcglobal.net; art.silen.mediator@gmail.com  

"Question assumptions"

DSN 11.5, running on Win7;Intel Core i7 CPU 970 @3.20 GHz; System Memory 12 GB; Graphic AMD Radcon HD6570; System Board 2A861.04E01; System Bios 6.15