Handy Tips
First of all, those guys at Microsoft are supposed to be pretty smart. But they do all kinds of dumb shit. My biggest peeves with their software are as follows:
1 – The fact that when you open an Excel document from an Outlook attachment, it opens that stupid review toolbar. This monkeys with my settings and costs me valuable time, 0.25 seconds at a time.
2 – That MS Word documents opened from Outlook open in document map mode
3 – That the Links folder in Internet Explorer will perpetually come back no matter how often you delete it.
Fortunately, I found solutions for these items:
1 – Can be solved by adding some code to your personal.xls file. See here.
2 – Can be solved by clicking Tools\Options. On the general tab, unclick the box the box that says something to the effect of Allow starting in reading lay out.
3 – There’s a way to fix using a registry editor but I just use Firefox.
Microsoft products do other stupid shit but those are the ones that annoyed me this week.
August 9th, 2006 at 2:08 am
and you once asked why the heck I use linux?
August 9th, 2006 at 10:26 am
Microsoft? What’s that? *cackles with flee*
Linux. It works, it’s free (as in speech), and it’s free (as in beer). It doesn’t spy on you, update (downgrade!) behind your back, or purposely prevent you from doing simple things (like listen to your own music).
August 9th, 2006 at 10:33 am
Can’t tell you from where I know this….
But… We’ll call a guy I know …. “Jim”.
“Jim” was hired to work for MS in a managerial capacity. He had problems with a very creative, but very disruptive and unruly employee who refused to take direction, and would actively work behind “Jim’s” and group’s backs, causing mass confusion, and adding months onto the ship date.
“Jim” went to talk to his boss about the employee. His boss asked “Do you want to Word him?”
“Jim” was confused. As he found out – the problem employees are apparently all shuffled, one by one, over to Office. If you’re good, but just a pain to deal with, so it’s not really feasible to fire you, well, you get Word’ed.
‘Splained a lot to me.
As for the other: Remember, Microsoft is not there to make your life easy. If they can, that’s great, but that’s secondary, at best, to the Main Reason To Be: To Take Over Everything.
They like it when things are easy for you, and they’ll take all the credit, but the most important thing to MS is being able to run everybody else off when they feel like it.
(Many, many, many examples. But just for a short comment: All those “email viruses” are actually Outlook issues. Attacking through incredibly-badly-designed and easily-subverted access holes, put there, so MS could “seamlessly” “integrate new solutions”. For your benefit, of course!)
August 9th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
Ben: Do you propose that OpenOffice doesn’t do anything stupid, ever? Didn’t think so.
SaysUncle: The MS people are actually very good at usage testing and statistics gathering. If Word starts in “Document Map Mode” by default unless you change the options, that’s almost certainly because that is what most users want.
Given that they cannot possibly make all users happy by default, since there is not agreement among all users as to what should happen, they do the reasonable thing – default to what most people want and have an option to set it.