Commitment to excrement!
Jan. 16th, 2004 05:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dweniusEvery time I am forced to spend more than 5 minutes attempting to use a Microsoft product to perform Real Work, I want to shoot someone.
This is long and profane. It must needs be so.
Let's start at the top, eh? If you get anywhere near the volume of email that I do, you need to sort and search very large folders with alarming regularity, and let's face it, you have a lot of large attachments buried in your inbox for lack of time to clean them out over your slow VPN connection. Let's assume you are forced to use Outlook because your cow orkers all expect to be able to put things on your calendar. Fine. Here are 3 ways you are fucked:
1. You will have noticed that clicking the "search" button on the default Outlook toolbar is a blocking operation that locks up the whole app until your search completes, and might even stop you from switching to any other application other than maybe the Task manager. Boy, I'm sure glad MS is charging ahead into the OS design principles of the late 1980s! Maybe soon they will have a real multithreading, 32 bit operating system! Imagine!
2. If you are smart, you will also have discovered that the Advanced Find window does NOT block, and you will use it religiously. But you are still fucked, because if you go to a file on the desktop, say a zip, and right-mouse-select "send to->mail recipient", it will open a new mail message and attach that file. Good so far. Now, switch windows or desktops and go back to Outlook (so you can do an advanced find, or copy another attachment out of a saved mail folder into that new mail message). Damage! That new message is yet another modal window, a focus-and-control grabbing rat bastard that will completely keep you from doing ANYTHING else in Outlook until you save,close, or send.
3. So you decide that your folders are maybe too big (and mine are, no doubt about it) and you look at the Outlook archive settings...which by default allow you to save messages older than X days. No save by subject matter, no save by sender. Right, as though I remember which month you sent the fucking memo, or as if projects come in a linear, serial fashion with a well defined start/stop cycle and no overlap, or that it has EVER in the HISTORY OF COMMUNICATION mades sense to take a live data set and make parts of it unavailable and unsearchable based on the arbitrary time distinctions of a long-dead Pope. AAAAAAAH. These are SOLVED PROBLEMS, people! They've been solved for decades!!! I swear, I'm going back to Mutt running in Cygwin. I may havbe to create my own macros and aliases, but limiting a 1,000 item folder to messages that match a search string takes [string] plus one keystroke, no mouse, and finishes in a blink.
Word: Ever tried to maintain sets of bulleted lists inside a Word table? DON'T. Cutting and pasting will occasionally leave you with an orphan bullet. You can't select it to delete it; you can't even backspace over it. If you attempt to paste new data to the same line, the text will appear, but the bullet will go away, and you won't be able to get it back...you'll have to select the whole text, un-bullet it, cut it, paste it, then bullet it again. Damaged. Go ahead, turn on the "show formatting" um, "feature". It will tell you nothing. I yearn for the days of VAX Wordperfect, and in the meantime I use joe, in Cygwin, and then run stuff through AFT to generate HTML docs or PDFs.
Visio will randomly decide not to print your custom GIF icons. Shows up on the diagram, shows up on Print Preview, but over on the actual printer...nothing. Or, tiny little oompa-loompa icons with orange faces and green hair. Or, or, or, or, you put the icons on a layer, print that layer, great! It works! Go back, merge layers, try to print all...no icons again. Visio does have a very nice, fast, set of alignment tools for making your diagrams look professional (despite their humble origins on a napkin). These features predated MS's acquisition of the software of course, but to their credit, nobody tried to "improve" them.
If MS were smart, they would steal this "arbitrary selected object alignment" code and oh, I dunno, put it into PowerPoint where it is SORELY NEEDED, for the LOVE OF GOD, I just want to align these three text boxes on their left hand edge, and to judge from the behavior, one text box is drunk, or has a broken foot, or else the very layout grid itself is warped. Truly ugly.
I used to think Powerpoint was the worst piece of software on the face of the earth. I was wrong. MSProject takes the prize by a country mile. It may be the single worst abomination to masquerade as a productivity app ever. No project manager I know actually uses it to rationalize staffing resources; it's a task-listing tool only, and it can't even do that well. Here's my favorite: The task description field has some reasonable character limit...255 I think, though it may be 128. My staff likes to write very detailed task descriptions; when I cut and paste their email into the task column, it truncates every field. But wait! You can add the text to a note associated with each task, and a little icon will appear in the left hand column with the (i) icon in it...wave the mouse around, and Project will pop up the contents of the note. EXCEPT...yes, of course, the DISPLAY popup for the task notes has the SAME GODDAMN CHARACTER LIMITATION as the actual field.
Windows 2000...oh why waste the breath? I mean, as an interactive desktop operating system, it is terminally useless without third party additions: Cygwin, the no-X-required rxvt, a good multi-desktop tool like Perfect Screens, mutt, joe, firebird, winamp...there are others, too tired to bother.
Has MS done *anything* right other than marketing? I mean, Windows Media Player sometimes can't play streaming files in its native format. How do you get so borken?
This is long and profane. It must needs be so.
Let's start at the top, eh? If you get anywhere near the volume of email that I do, you need to sort and search very large folders with alarming regularity, and let's face it, you have a lot of large attachments buried in your inbox for lack of time to clean them out over your slow VPN connection. Let's assume you are forced to use Outlook because your cow orkers all expect to be able to put things on your calendar. Fine. Here are 3 ways you are fucked:
1. You will have noticed that clicking the "search" button on the default Outlook toolbar is a blocking operation that locks up the whole app until your search completes, and might even stop you from switching to any other application other than maybe the Task manager. Boy, I'm sure glad MS is charging ahead into the OS design principles of the late 1980s! Maybe soon they will have a real multithreading, 32 bit operating system! Imagine!
2. If you are smart, you will also have discovered that the Advanced Find window does NOT block, and you will use it religiously. But you are still fucked, because if you go to a file on the desktop, say a zip, and right-mouse-select "send to->mail recipient", it will open a new mail message and attach that file. Good so far. Now, switch windows or desktops and go back to Outlook (so you can do an advanced find, or copy another attachment out of a saved mail folder into that new mail message). Damage! That new message is yet another modal window, a focus-and-control grabbing rat bastard that will completely keep you from doing ANYTHING else in Outlook until you save,close, or send.
3. So you decide that your folders are maybe too big (and mine are, no doubt about it) and you look at the Outlook archive settings...which by default allow you to save messages older than X days. No save by subject matter, no save by sender. Right, as though I remember which month you sent the fucking memo, or as if projects come in a linear, serial fashion with a well defined start/stop cycle and no overlap, or that it has EVER in the HISTORY OF COMMUNICATION mades sense to take a live data set and make parts of it unavailable and unsearchable based on the arbitrary time distinctions of a long-dead Pope. AAAAAAAH. These are SOLVED PROBLEMS, people! They've been solved for decades!!! I swear, I'm going back to Mutt running in Cygwin. I may havbe to create my own macros and aliases, but limiting a 1,000 item folder to messages that match a search string takes [string] plus one keystroke, no mouse, and finishes in a blink.
Word: Ever tried to maintain sets of bulleted lists inside a Word table? DON'T. Cutting and pasting will occasionally leave you with an orphan bullet. You can't select it to delete it; you can't even backspace over it. If you attempt to paste new data to the same line, the text will appear, but the bullet will go away, and you won't be able to get it back...you'll have to select the whole text, un-bullet it, cut it, paste it, then bullet it again. Damaged. Go ahead, turn on the "show formatting" um, "feature". It will tell you nothing. I yearn for the days of VAX Wordperfect, and in the meantime I use joe, in Cygwin, and then run stuff through AFT to generate HTML docs or PDFs.
Visio will randomly decide not to print your custom GIF icons. Shows up on the diagram, shows up on Print Preview, but over on the actual printer...nothing. Or, tiny little oompa-loompa icons with orange faces and green hair. Or, or, or, or, you put the icons on a layer, print that layer, great! It works! Go back, merge layers, try to print all...no icons again. Visio does have a very nice, fast, set of alignment tools for making your diagrams look professional (despite their humble origins on a napkin). These features predated MS's acquisition of the software of course, but to their credit, nobody tried to "improve" them.
If MS were smart, they would steal this "arbitrary selected object alignment" code and oh, I dunno, put it into PowerPoint where it is SORELY NEEDED, for the LOVE OF GOD, I just want to align these three text boxes on their left hand edge, and to judge from the behavior, one text box is drunk, or has a broken foot, or else the very layout grid itself is warped. Truly ugly.
I used to think Powerpoint was the worst piece of software on the face of the earth. I was wrong. MSProject takes the prize by a country mile. It may be the single worst abomination to masquerade as a productivity app ever. No project manager I know actually uses it to rationalize staffing resources; it's a task-listing tool only, and it can't even do that well. Here's my favorite: The task description field has some reasonable character limit...255 I think, though it may be 128. My staff likes to write very detailed task descriptions; when I cut and paste their email into the task column, it truncates every field. But wait! You can add the text to a note associated with each task, and a little icon will appear in the left hand column with the (i) icon in it...wave the mouse around, and Project will pop up the contents of the note. EXCEPT...yes, of course, the DISPLAY popup for the task notes has the SAME GODDAMN CHARACTER LIMITATION as the actual field.
Windows 2000...oh why waste the breath? I mean, as an interactive desktop operating system, it is terminally useless without third party additions: Cygwin, the no-X-required rxvt, a good multi-desktop tool like Perfect Screens, mutt, joe, firebird, winamp...there are others, too tired to bother.
Has MS done *anything* right other than marketing? I mean, Windows Media Player sometimes can't play streaming files in its native format. How do you get so borken?
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no subject
Date: 2004-01-16 05:26 am (UTC)Not that you really want anything but sympathy...
Date: 2004-01-16 05:50 am (UTC)I grant you both MS Project and Outlook are pieces of shit no matter who you are.
Re: Not that you really want anything but sympathy...
Date: 2004-01-16 10:34 am (UTC)And in my course in system design, we're designing databases using Access. I weep. I long for Borland Paradox, believe it or not. My one consolation is that we're not using Filemaker, which makes Access look like a dream app by comparison.
And I don't consider myself especially technically literate.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-16 11:10 am (UTC)The job itself was the standard tech writer thing.
The catch? All docs to be done in MS Word.
As far as I'm aware, it's been open for something like four or five months now.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-16 12:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-16 03:14 pm (UTC)http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Microsoft+admits%22