[Written in email to my wife from my (former) place of employment — an all Microsoft facility.]
If I’m ever found in my office at work dead of a stroke or coronary, please sue Microsoft for wrongful death. I think I was very close to crossing over this morning. Certainly, there was a bright light burning hotly before my eyes but I resisted moving toward it and eventually regained my composure.
But it’s not getting any easier trying to do the day-to-day tasks of my job when saddled with Microsoft Windows NT (Workstation), Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Outlook and the assorted Microsoft doo-dads that plague the WinTel PC I’m burdened with at work.
This morning I was already pulling my hair out over Excel and Access and it was Outlook that had me seeing bright red.
Excel documents have been inconvenient to open for weeks now. The problem started when I tried to link to some Excel files on a web site. The “.xls” files started loading into the browser window as gibberish rather than being downloaded to disk to be opened with Excel. I stopped the download and used the browser to “Save Link As…”
The xls files had very long file names (70-80 characters) and double-clicking on the downloaded files resulted in Excel starting but putting up a dialog saying that the file xxx could not be found. Most curious since I’d just double-clicked it in the directory to which I’d saved them. Even more curiously, after dismissing the dialog, another popped up telling me the same thing. Upon closer examination I saw that the path name it showed as being not findable was only the latter portion of the entire path name.
Repeating the process I figured out that the first “Can’t Find” dialog was using the first part of the path name and the second was using the latter part of the file’s path. Clearly, Windows “New Technology” (NT) was choking on the very long file names so I shortened them to about 15 characters. When double-clicked, Excel still claimed that they could not be found to open them. So I shortened the names to 8.3 format and tried again. They still could not be “found” for opening.
Finally, using the File Open command In Excel I tried again only to find that the resulting spreadsheets were blank even though the files themselves were in the range of 60-70 K in size.
I returned to the directory to trash the files and noted that the Icons for the “xls” files were not proper Excel icons. I had previously been in list view of the download directory so I have no idea at what point this transformation took place. I hadn’t really noticed what icon was being used up to that point.
These events seem to have triggered a system-wide association problem with Excel files. From this point on, when I double-click an “xls” file, Excel starts but does not open the selected file. It simply presents a new, blank workbook. Thus it is that I cannot open Excel files by double-clicking them. Naturally, I tried to fix this by associating the “xls” file suffix with Excel but that proved impossible.
Looking through the list of file associations I can find no association for “xls” files and when I try to add one, NT tells me the extension ‘xls’ is already in use by the file type “xls_auto_file” but that type does not exist in the list of associations. And I’ve been through the whole list of associations and ‘xls’ does not show up anywhere.
Since I can’t open Excel files by double-clicking, when I received one as an email attachment this morning (curiously, files received as attachments display the proper icon within Outlook) and out of force of habit double-clicked it, I got an empty Excel workbook. I had to go back to Outlook and do a “Save As…” on the Excel file (since I haven’t yet figured out where Outlook hides file attachments it receives) and place a copy of it where I could quickly navigate to it when opening it from Excel’s File Open command. A minor annoyance, and one to which I am becoming accustomed.
Immediately after the minor annoyance with Excel, I had another brand new (today) problem with Excel. I have an Access database that uses tables linked-to from a network server. Primarily, I run queries on the data in the tables. Today my queries mostly don’t work, which is to say, the queries return no records. One or two of them sometimes return records but if I then apply a filter to the records and subsequently remove the filter, I’m left looking at no records whatever. I have to close the query and reopen it for a single shot at filtering and sorting before the query stops working when I remove the filter or sort. I had to close and reopen the query about a dozen times to gather the information I needed. Even more annoying than the Excel problem.
But it was Outlook that had me gnashing my teeth and trembling. Having been forcibly migrated from Eudora to Outlook for email, I’m still not adapting well. I routinely add to my reasons to hate Outlook and today was no exception.
On particular types of email, I am required to insert a notice — boilerplate language. I received the boilerplate in an email (in Outlook) which originated with the legal department and was forwarded to me by my project manager. At the time, I copied the text and pasted it into a Microsoft Word document and saved it. Today I had occasion to use it. So…
In Outlook, I created the email message and when it came time to insert the boilerplate, I chose “File” from the “Insert” menu. I navigated my way to the Word file of boilerplate I’d previously saved and selected it then hit “OK” at which point Outlook added the boilerplate as an attachment — a rather strange action for what is supposed to, after all, be an “Insert” operation. So I removed the attachment and tried again. This time I checked out the dialog box more closely and observed three radio buttons labeled “Text Only”, “Attachment” and “Shortcut”. I made sure that “Text Only” was selected and again pressed “OK”.
Now, You’d think that “Text Only” would mean that the text portion of the Microsoft Word document would be extracted by Outlook and inserted into the email, leaving behind the formatting information from the Word document. At least, that’s what I’d think. I thought wrong. Outlook instead inserted the entire Word document as if it were text. All the formatting and other data — most of which is gibberish when treated as ASCII text — was plunked right into my email message. I was looking at mostly those little square undefined character symbols with a sprinkling of yen symbols and characters with umlauts, tildes and the like.
So, trying to “Insert” the boilerplate caused it to be attached and trying to “Attach” a Word document inserted it into the body of the email. Gotcha.
That’s when my head felt like it might explode. First Excel, then Access and now Outlook. My neurons overloaded. It was not even 8:30 in the morning and I’d already overdosed on Microsoft.
I’m betting that I can insert an “exe” file as “Text Only” and Outlook will obligingly convert the entire works to ASCII gibberish. I’m not going to try this; there’s no telling what might happen to this very fragile OS as a result. I just don’t trust NT/Outlook as far as I can throw Bill Gates’ mansion.
I had to go back to Word and save the boilerplate as a “txt” file so that the “Text Only” insertion really would be only the text. All in a day’s work when using Microsoft products.
Another quirk I noted later in the day: When attaching a document to a Microsoft Outlook email, an icon shows up on the outgoing mail to indicate the presence of the attachment. Curiously, the “attachment” is inserted at the cursor insertion point so that when I attached a document with my cursor in the middle of a word, the attachment icon broke the word in two. As noted above the attachment process is initiated from the “Insert” menu. One would have thought, however, that when choosing “attachment” as the method of inserting, it wouldn’t break up the document to which it is attached. After all, when I attach (staple) a document to another, the first document is not altered.
I marvel daily that Microsoft has so insinuated itself into Big Business selling products that behave the way they do.