As a non-coder, I'm astonished that people can get computers to do anything at all.
At the same time, I'm also astonished at the degree to which people put up with profoundly buggy, awkward, and bloated applications. I'm a Mac user too, but my job requires me to use Microsoft Word. A lot. It crashes, it's inconsistent, it misapplies styles, it alters the text I'm writing at what seems like random. Often I'll save a document in one font and I'll re-open it later and it'll be in three different fonts. I can't understand why the market hasn't forced Microsoft to fix this kind of crap, or why alternately we haven't just found a better program en masse.
Oh, and I should add that I use an XP PC at work and although XP itself is stable there, I expect applications to crash every day. And I am only really using Word, Excel, and Outlook.
I don't know what causes it, to be honest. I do find it baffling that in my current office I've never seen Windows or Office crash, but I've seen it happen all the time in one previous one. Whether it's machine configuration, network configuration, the hardware being cheaper, or what.
I use MS Word a lot for both work and writing at home and I've never had it crash on me at all, even though I'm using some pretty weird BBC-sourced radio script templates. Or the scottish screen ones for that matter.
Wword doesn't crash on me - but it IS horrifically 'over (un)helpful' on style applications and the like. Having done some Word coding a while back it has an inherently complex model that is fundamentally flawed in a number of areas and in particular some that make anything to do with styles really difficult to get right.
Oh and have you *seen* the workaround in Excel when you have range of cells that are numbers formatted as text and you want to format them all as number?? Doing it through Format, Cells just doesn't work - but full amrks to the guy/gal that though of the workaround in put it the help files.
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andrewducker) wrote2007-02-21 05:33 pm
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At the same time, I'm also astonished at the degree to which people put up with profoundly buggy, awkward, and bloated applications. I'm a Mac user too, but my job requires me to use Microsoft Word. A lot. It crashes, it's inconsistent, it misapplies styles, it alters the text I'm writing at what seems like random. Often I'll save a document in one font and I'll re-open it later and it'll be in three different fonts. I can't understand why the market hasn't forced Microsoft to fix this kind of crap, or why alternately we haven't just found a better program en masse.
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I've not had Windows crash on me either, outside of a problem I had a with some dodgy memory about two years ago, for about 4 years.
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Oh and have you *seen* the workaround in Excel when you have range of cells that are numbers formatted as text and you want to format them all as number?? Doing it through Format, Cells just doesn't work - but full amrks to the guy/gal that though of the workaround in put it the help files.