Let's bitch about Microsoft!

[Hunter_Hawk]

@Blake

Another favourite: Microsoft help files that don’t help. Just yesterday I was trying to change the password in XP. Not on a network but a stand alone PC that I had full admin rights to. No search term worked. You coudln’t allow “change password” to return instructions on how to change the password. Oh no. That returns results on how to change passwords on network accounts, how to set password rules and so forth. Nothing at all on how to change a login password. I finally remebered how to do it, but even then I couldn’t find instructions in the help files.

Where were you looking? Because if I go to Start > Help and Support, then type “change password” in the search field, the second item in the “Suggested topics” list is the instructions on how to change your password if your computer is in a workgroup. Is that not the correct set of instructions?

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@Cornelius_Tuggerson

It is said that Bill Gates is a great philanthropist, but he is actually a criminal and an asshole. All that money he is sending to Africa was obtained through illegal monopolistic anti-competitive means, its not his to be giving away. We should prosecute him for running a monopoly, nationalize his fortune and fire him out of a giant canon into the sun.

What has Phoebus ever done to you?

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@Hunter_Hawk

Come to think of it, this may be what’s causing some capitalization autocorrect weirdness in a couple of docs I’m working on; I’ll have to look into that when I get back to work. Thanks for pointing this out.

Anyhoo, it looks like you can turn off the switch to automatically add words to the autocorrect exceptions list, as well as delete items that were added to the list.

Yes. My problem isn’t the mere existence of the feature; it’s that its default setting is guaranteed to cause more problems than it solves, and it’s sufficiently obscure that it’s easy to imagine many people never figuring it out.

Re: the Ribbon in Office 97…

I don’t hate it as much as I used to, but that’s only because I’ve gotten used to it and know how to deal with it. For anyone who doesn’t know, it’s better left minimized and placed above the Quick Access toolbar, which you can customize to your heart’s content. For me, step 1 of that customization is a bit counter-intuitive: I dumped all the icons for commands for which there is an easily-memorable control+letter combo. For example, where Save was, I placed Save All.

[ZebraShaSha]

@Typo_Knig

M$ Word make so many routine and easy tasks hard, that the one and only time I found it make a difficult task easy, I wanted to call the Guinness Book of World Records. I’ve been using Word since the early 90s. There have been times I would have been better off directly editing Postscript using vi over a 300 baud remote line than using M$ Word.

One fine day I was finishing up a piece of software documentation in M$ Word, on a tight deadline. All I needed to do at that point was update the table of contents, print the final copy, and save the file. But Word in its exceedingly finite wisdom decided that when I printed the copy - the copy I had to send to the client THAT DAY so I could get paid!!! - it would conveniently set the page listed for the start of every chapter in the table of contents to page 2. A two hundred page document, but every chapter started on page 2. I did not re-generate the TOC, I just hit the print button, and saw the TOC pages all turn to “2”. Not enough :mad: in the world for that one. I finally learned I had to save the file, update the TOC, save the file again, close the file, open the file, check the TOC, and then print it. Then close the file without saving it again (because M$ Word, which is soooo much smarter than I am - thinks that printing a file is changing it). That usually worked in printing my TOC properly. I think I had to run widdershins around an abandoned church somewhere in there, it’s been a few years. The little magic booga-booga dance got me through the rest of the documents I had to update and print. I’m pretty sure M$ has fixed this particular bug, but that day my co-workers had to talk me out of driving from Maryland to Redmond, WA so I could kick Bill Gates in the nuts.

I’m just as happy to not have a criminal assault on my record, but it would have been very satisfying.

M$ has perfected the art of producing software that people will pay for - whether or not it works. Early versions of Windoze turned most computers into bricks, but people bought M$ Win, and then all the upgrades. :rolleyes: Not that M$ doesn’t make some good products - I’m a huge Excel geek - but they sell an awful lot of crappy ones.

Don’t get me started on MCSEs who, in the words of Babylon 5, combine arrogance and stupidity in one efficient package.

While I hate Word as much or more than anyone here, you, sir, were using the wrong tool for the job. As hard as hell as it is to learn, TeX/LaTex/Lyx are really the only game in town as far as 20+ page documents with cross-references, TOCs, etc. I would never consider Word for that. Just thinking about it makes my blood cold.

And Word is just a piece of shit. The typography is atrocious: you have to dive deep into the bowls of the program just to turn on ligatures, there is no baseline support, margins are impossible to work with - it’s a nightmare, plain and simple.

I just don’t understand how a good option has yet to come along. Following typographic rules is easy from a programming stand-point, while making the document beautiful without anyone really trying. That’s a win-win, so why is LaTex the only game in town for good typography?

[Early_Out]

Many years ago (like almost 25 years), we used QuarkXpress on Macs. Didn’t bother with a word processing program at all. I couldn’t believe how clumsy MS Word for the Mac was when I finally saw it, and when I hit WordPerfect on an IBM PC of that era, my jaw dropped. No GUI, no WYSIWYG. Printing a document was an adventure, because you never knew what it was going to look like.

How is QuarkXPress regarded these days? Even back then, it was easy to control things like tracking and kerning (want to get rid of that widow? Just dial back the tracking in tiny increments until it snaps back to the preceding line.), to get text flowing around graphics, and so on. Smooth, intuitive, and almost bug-free.

[Magiver]

Add Excel’s incessant intuition. I tried graphing something with months in it and Excel insisted on filling in months that aren’t part of the data. Had to force the dates into text. OO just assumes you know what you’re doing. Wouldn’t be so bad if I could turn it off.

[ParentalAdvisory]

Nobody needs a version after Office 2003, the last best version ever.