I have a hard time coming up with arguments against this or that in a dispute, simply because I tend to forget the events which grieved me. So, to counter this fault, I began to write them down. The best place to put these things in writing is, so far, the blogue:
It's not a formula, you moron
Disclaimer: I'm using OpenOffice for most of the stuff I write.
Today I had Excel 2007 already open for some reason, and I wanted to put together a short table of various data - comparing some six outside systems, to which we need to export data. The comparison doesn't include any scoring, it's just a short list, to have the differences in one place.
Row 10, format of logicals. First app uses "TRUE,FALSE". Second one, "-1, 0"... which I tried to enter as is, and Excel complains:
I am forever the fan of "if you want to sleep, press Yes, if you want to eat, press No, and if you want to sit in a chair press Cancel". It's much more interesting than having buttons with "sleep", "eat" and "sit in a chair" - but I know that's something that m$ will not add in a thousand years, it would cost too much to develop. It cost me two days(1); it would cost them probably five hundred man-days. (no, they wouldn't have a single person develop that... that would be too simple and would look like the dialogs anyone else already has, ergo legal problems, so it would have to have a completely new name, look, etc etc)
Anyway, I click no. Here comes yet another message:
Ah, so I'm not supposed to have a list of entries where first character is a minus, eh? Now how hard would it have been to have a dialog like this:
"The value of '-1, 0' that you entered looks like a formula with an error(3). Do you want to
"make it number -10", "make it string -1,0", "correct manually","read help"?
Another one came later... not quite related to this, except it's in the next cell. Almost the same case, just no minus. This is becoming ridiculous:
No, Excel(2), you're wrong. It does not contain a date string of any kind, and... where was it that you saw two digits? Can you count, to, like... two?
It seems that Excel, in this incarnation, was written to be as helpful as possible, to assist the regular user with everyday tasks. Well, it does get in the way. As soon as you're doing anything that isn't an everyday task, it gets hopelessly confused. It annoys... or amuses, up to you.
Addition: row 14 contains info on fields:rules, where I had n:1, 1:1, n:m. Well, Excel knows better. There's no need to have 1:1 - it's 01:01 now (and it becomes 01:01:00 when you edit it). Didn't even ask.
I wrote another one, about Netflix - their privacy etc statement is 10000 words long, which means they have at least a hundred lawyers, so if any kind of shit whatsoever occurs, they'll make sure you'll be the culprit. I gave them a fuckoff for ten months already (for intrusive advertising alone, so far), and now I got more reasons.
Dad recounts how they celebrated our birthdays, with a cake and a bit of rakija. Says he's got a new modem, installed by the son of that guy from former vineyard. And got both cyrillic and latinic installed properly. Aslo Toza is due to perform something major with his machine.
The shot is from Lena's room - amigurumi is this technique for three dee crochet, making figures. The one on the right is a llama, Lena made it of some sort of clay.
At work, Norman suffers the financial reports, as this western accounting is just overboard byzanthine. What the andrak is „allocation record“ - allocating what from where? To what? Is it debit or credit? To dad's dick, I'm so happy to never have even touched the stuff.
Here, later he said it's not a transaction, doesn't change the totals. Why is it written then? And why does it influence the report when included or excluded? Turns out it's the binding of payments with bills... devil may know how they did that, obviously more complication.
Luckily, I wasn't around during that, got it later. My internet went stupid, I went upstairs at least four times, reset the modem, router (which, who knows why, thought the year was 2002). The times of things are unclear, there are chats from 5:10 to 21:33. Who can know now.
On UA, Željko asks how to export images from Excel. I reply to export as html, and will find them in a subdirectory. May be too many pictures there, but the one will be there.
Edička Pikman in his bullshit mode again, „actually, the demagogues who always blame corporations first are still more sophisticated, tey go 'free market isn't working and needs improvement' by slathering another layer of blockades and prohibitions“. Right you are, shame on them, I say. The corporations should be completely free to charge the meds that cost them 11 cents at 250$, if the market can take it. And I don't see why don't they boycott the markets of Canada and EU, where the regulations are so harsh to expose them to catastrophic losses. Why are they doing that? Being a loss leader on one or two products is one thing, doing it across the board is sheer suicide. Their stockholders should be informed of that.... Ah, what, you mean they're sill making profit out there? By the decibels it sounded as if they're losing their pants there.
Maša's son is a schoolboy now, and she got lost on school's website, can't find the page with supplies to buy, and they said other parents found it without a hitch. Welcome to the club of us bad searchers, it's probably caused by us being too computer literate. Have someone clueless help you with that.
BTW, Alphonse just reworked the UA from fox 9 (started with 5 back then) to dot net, and now half the stuff ain't working, specially search (which is the only reason I'm paying subscription). It actually works, but in a limited way and annoyingly slowly. Eh, m$...
Someone on sezam noticed that there's no address on the driver's [licence], but there's a space to write changes of it.
(2) some fifteen years later, when 'incel' became a word, the running joke was that the area of intersection between excel and incel was „wrongly assumes that something is a date“.
(3) they wouldn't write it like that even under torture. To actually quote the name or value of the thing which caused the error is utterly un-m$, gives the user too much information. The last guy who wrote it like that was fired. At.
