Phew!
Not only did I finish a first draft of the layout – which means I’m going to make my deadline, even if I skitter around the corner on two wheels – but the company bought me a copy of Microsoft Office for home.
I know what you’re thinking – Microsoft Anything is shit. And so it is. But I’ve been sitting in front of it for 40 years now(!) and I kinda know how things work, even if I have to kick them in the shins from time to time.
The open source substitutes like Libre Office and Open Office do a really good job mimicking the function of Office, but I’ve struggled for years with compatibility issues trying to take documents back and forth from home to work. Objects disappear or move or crash. They don’t play nice together.
They didn’t buy Office for this project, by the way – they bought it to get into an Access database. So I’m unsure whether to work on the book with this software – the version I have at work is 2007. Do I trust it to be backward compatible? The clock is running out…
p.s. Ooo! It’s fun to have an up-to-date version! I’ve been fiddling with the fonts in Outlook all afternoon.
p.p.s. Who you calling sad?
Posted: August 8th, 2023 under personal.
Comments: 11
Comments
Comment from QuasiModo
Time: August 8, 2023, 8:29 pm
My sister sprung for Office365 for Family, get all the Office desktop software plus all the online versions, 1TB of space on OneDrive, Microsoft Teams (like Zoom), apps for the phone, etc…it’s a pretty good deal. My photos on my Android phone automagically sync to my OneDrive 🙂
If it wasn’t for Office and some Adobe programs, I’d have switched to Linux already.
Comment from durnedyankee
Time: August 8, 2023, 10:42 pm
Son #2 sprung for ours.
I don’t like it storing MY stuff up on the cloud and I fight with it to make local copies.
Call my cynical and suspicious. 40 years of protecting data from everyone else doesn’t just go away. Realistically I ain’t doing anything worth stealing these days so it’s more of a futile fight against change.
Other than that, 40 years of corporate work meant you stuck with the company packages to make sure everything was compatible everywhere and…Mordorsoft ruled all.
Comment from Uncle Al
Time: August 8, 2023, 11:01 pm
A little meme just popped into my head, Clint Eastwood meets the Rolling Stones…
Hey (Hey), you (You), GET OFF OF MY CLOUD
Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: August 9, 2023, 7:12 am
I have hung garlic about the house and have a bottle of holy water to hand (40% ABV, naturally). If that little creep with the nasty sweaters so much as shows his face at the window…
Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: August 9, 2023, 10:51 am
Uncle B.
Don’t badgers keep a stash of bugs in crisp bags for snacks?
A great many people worldwide would pay to see that creep tackled and forcefully fed fistfulls of grubs offered his fill of his favorite snacks by generous country folk. Perhaps Dame Weasel could capture the moment on electronic media which would then be automatically stored on the cloud!
Later she could engage her artistic talents to create a courtroom style sketch of the moment suitable for mugs, screensavers and t-shirts.
Comment from technochitlin
Time: August 9, 2023, 1:22 pm
I’ve tried and tried, but the plain fact is there is no good replacement for the Office suite. It doesn’t work all that well, but better than any of the so-called replacements. OneNote, Outlook, Excel, Word, cold dead hands etc.
I still despise the little rat that used to run MS though.
Comment from QuasiModo
Time: August 9, 2023, 1:45 pm
“Other than that, 40 years of corporate work meant you stuck with the company packages to make sure everything was compatible everywhere and…Mordorsoft ruled all.”
This is me as well, always had to stay compatible with clients. I’ve tinkered with Libre Office…it’s getting pretty good…good enough for what little I do these days, anyway.
Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: August 9, 2023, 3:07 pm
Excel: Thou shalt have no other spreadsheet program before thee.
Word: Well, I am an Old Testament guy in regards to Word. Having used it since my its birth, I find comfort in its familiarity. It makes sense to me.
HOWEVER: MicroSoft lost me because they fell into the 1950’s Detroit Automotive industry trend of “ NEW and IMPROVED for 1958! changing things that weren’t improved by changing them.
It’s been a decade since I was a serious user of either Word or Excel but when I quit I used to dread every new iteration. Moving the controls around is NOT an improvement, etc, etc. The worst thing though was MS’ habit of turning on all the new gizmo’s as the default. When I get to Hell, as soon as I get done with In-Processing I am going to hunt down the bastard who thought that setting “Book-View” as the default was a good idea and punch him in the nose, even if I have to wait in line to do it.
Comment from Uncle BadgerI still
Time: August 9, 2023, 7:55 pm
I’m so old I still think in Wordstar.
Comment from Uncle Al
Time: August 9, 2023, 11:58 pm
Is this a contest? (-:
I’m so old I think in Eberhard Faber, Tintenkuli, and Underwood.
Comment from Carl
Time: August 10, 2023, 12:49 pm
I’m older than nearly all of you. I wrote my first computer program in 1962 in Algol and graduated to Fortran in 1967.
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