Personal and corporate screw-ups

I received a letter today from Minnesota Revenue that I still owed income taxes for 2013.

My first look at my spreadsheet didn’t find anything wrong.  Maybe the state wasn’t considering the tax withheld by payers to us.  When I looked further, I had put fixed data in a worksheet rather than linking to a figure elsewhere.  Ouch!

I won’t let the state off entirely.  The letter only listed the estimated tax payments I had made, not the tax withheld.

As I was adjusting my spreadsheet, Microsoft sent a notice that upgrades to Office were available.  I waited for these to be downloaded and installed, and then continued my correction of my tax spreadsheet.

The download or my correction may have been a big mistake.  Excel crashed twice!  The restored spreadsheet looked was altered in bad ways.  Not only were the fonts in some cells changed, the size and shading of a window was changed.  The resulting sheets were ugly!

Speaking of spreadsheets, I won’t let Apple get off the hook.  For some reason, Apple has not included named cells or groups of cells in Numbers as in Excel.  One has to use an obscure coding using a page name and row numbers and column letters.  At least, if one changes the location of the cell or group, Numbers does adjust for the change.

How many seconds in a minute?

According to Apple, there are ten seconds in a minute!  Maybe even less.

Last week I downloaded and installed the latest Mavericks update on my Mac laptop.  Near the end of the lengthy process, it displayed “10 seconds left” for some part or another.  Twenty seconds later, the display was “10 seconds left” (or was it remaining?)  And again at thirty seconds on up to sixty seconds.  I don’t remember how soon after that time was displayed I started tracking the time, and I don’t remember how long after I had noted sixty seconds had passed before I stopped tracking.

But whatever, is this the lauded corporate “efficiency” that government supposedly lacks?  Whatever else is going on in the operating system that is inefficient.  I do know that Microsoft products have been getting slower to load.  I can almost go downstairs to pour a second cup of coffee while waiting for a spreadsheet to open.  This is even true of spreadsheets that don’t have a lot of data.

And of course, there are all the user complaints that seem to go on for years without resolution.

I do know from personal experience that not all problems are resolvable and that some take a long time to get enough data to solve.  In the sixties at Univac I was part of the small team that maintained the FORTRAN compiler.  We had a user report (number 498, I think) that we never solved.  Our main problem was trying to figure out what had happened on a computer we had no direct access to and not enough information to ask the right questions.  We never had another user report with the same problem.

On the other hand, I see complaints about the same problems year after year in the support communities for Apple and Microsoft.

What is the critical mass for these problems such that the big corporations will put enough resources into resolving these issues?

Here’s a radical idea!  For every unsolved problem a company has, the CEO should have his or her pay docked ten dollars per day.  Let’s be generous, and only count weekdays that are not holidays.  Would these problems go away sooner?

What about docking the CEOs pay for every day that false advertising is present.  Apple has made downloading Mavericks free to encourage people to move away from older operating systems.  Supposedly Numbers, Pages, and Keynote are free.  These are competitors to Microsoft’s Excel, Write, and Power Point.  These three Apple products are listed in a Top Ten Free downloads in the App Store.  However, if you place the cursor next to them, “$19.99” appears rather than “Free”.

Many users have complained about this for three months or more!  Is this another case of Adam Smith’s warning about trusting those who live by profit and have deceived and oppressed the public?

My computer reads my mind!

An annoying "feature" of Microsoft Excel for the Mac 2011 is that it will, without seeming cause, open a workbook at almost full screen rather than at the last size I closed it.

As I opened a worksheet a few minutes ago, I thought about this problem.  Sure enough, the workbook opened as almost full screen rather than the "tidy" size I last closed it at.

Another reminder that large corporations are not as efficient as many would like to believe.

Of course, I should remember that I do a lot of useful stuff with Excel, but it would be a little bit more comforting if its behavior was consistent and accurate.

The Corp giveth and the Corp taketh away

I thought this parody of Job 1:21 might be original with me.  I found only two references in my first try, both in reference to the Army Corps of Engineers and New Orleans.  When I broadened my search to "the corp gives", I found 17,000 references, some of them with my meaning of Corporation.

I thought of this phrase as I was working with macros in Excel 2011 for the Mac.  Microsoft took away macros in Excel 2008 and put them back in Excel 2011.  But the macros that worked in Excel 2004 don't always work in Excel 2011.

Also, when I plugged my iPod into my Mac, iTunes would automatically be launched.  iTunes would then begin syncing my iPod.  This was true even with OS X Lion.  Then in some version of iTunes the auto load/synch stopped.  I have to start iTunes myself.

This certainly is just an annoyance compared to Job's problems, but one would think the "free market" could provide a more consistent and efficient experience for its customers.

Was Microsoft Office 2011 for the Mac written by the government

After a long wait for a replacement for Office 2008, which took away Virtual Basic macros, I was able to buy Office 2011, which supposedly put macros back.

Guess what?  I'm not sure they work.

I put a simple one-line macro back in an Excel spreadsheet, and it worked.  But, every time I typed in a cell, Excel would only except one number and then do nothing.  I had to enter the data in the formula bar.  At least the formula bar seems to be standard in Office 2011; in some update to Office 2008 the formula bar would keep disappearing.

I tried removing the macro and putting it back in again, and now the macro stops with some mysterious error.

If I opened the progress bar in Entourage (Office 2008), it would be there the next time I opened Entourage.  In Outlook (Office 2011), it is never present the next time I open Outlook.

The installation process for Office 2011 ignored many of my preference from Office 2008.

Outlook changed the type font and size, and it only remembers the reset type font but not the reset size.

Outlook automatically includes the message I'm answering in my response.  I had turned this off in Entourage; I have yet to find a preference for this in Outlook.  I have to remember to remove the message in my response, and it is often below my writing area.

Outlook has put some of my old messages in the task list.

Outlook did not get my message categories right.  It put "Family" messages in "Iphone, saved to".

Outlook changed the links to many of my Entourage replies.  The linked messages sometime bear no relation to each other.

Gosh, with these errors and many others, Office 2011 must have been written by the government instead of an "efficient" private company.

To tell the truth, I do have some sympathy for the Microsoft programmers.  When I gave up on my own software programming company, for my far simpler program I had a problem list far longer than the list above.

I do wish Microsoft had had a bit bigger budget on testing.

I also wish that I could just call or email someone with these problems.  Instead, the user has to spend hours looking through forums to find a specific problem, which nobody may have raised yet.  This is part of the larger trend in far too many enterprises to push costs on to the customers.  See "Technology: A big bother we can't do without".

Accidental learning

I was entering some data in a spreadsheet and wanted to repeat the contents of the cell above. I thought I typed CMD-" but the current time appeared. With a little bit of playing around, I figured out that I had typed CMD-; instead.

OK, how do I get the current date? I went to Excel Help and after searching for several combinations of keyboard, enter, and date I found that one enters CONTROL-;

Now, how often I will use my new-found knowledge is another question.

Warning: I use Excel in Office 2004 for the Mac. Other versions may have different combinations. Software developers are not known for consistency across versions.