I find most of the user-friendliness design within the current editions of Microsoft Office to be counterproductive because they violate the principle of technology transparency.

For example, Microsoft Word includes many auto-format and auto-correction features that guess at your intended text and make corrections as you type. While useful for many situations, Microsoft failed to include a friendly method to disable the features. Thus, whenever I desire a different layout than what Microsoft considers to be good style, I'm forced to fight the word processor. In similar fashion, the default settings for Word cause the help system to intrude itself automatically in my composing whenever it thinks it should offer suggestions.

Just as my pencil writes what I want -- not what it thinks I should be writing, my word processor should not intrude itself automatically into my work. At the very least, I should have the option to disable these intrusion features with a single click instead of needing to adjust preference settings in several different locations.

Interestingly, with the new OfficeXP, Microsoft has scaled backed on the intrusive help resources.