Companies keep changing their web sites in the interest of “improvements”, but they more often make them more complicated and user-unfriendly.
I’ve been using Yahoo! Finance for years to get daily quotes for a small list of stocks. I made the request from a very obvious text block on the home page. Then either Firefox or Yahoo! Finance stopped allowing drag and drop, a very long-standing feature of the Macintosh. Then Yahoo! Finance moved the quote text block somewhere else. All in the name of improved interface for the users.
Boy! I never did make it through all the user complaints about the changes. I gave up on Yahoo! Finance and used TD Ameritrade instead.
Even with Ameritrade and its constantly changing home page it took me awhile to figure out how to consistently get the quotes I wanted.
But Ameritrade’s news page is a humble-jumble of hidden information
Where are the numbers in
Net Investment Income
Net Realized ST Cap Gains
Net Realized LT Cap Gains
Return of Capital or Other Capital Source
They are off the screen and can only be gotten by copying the area and pasting into a text document. Even then, the lines are all a humble-jumble.
Google’s Blogger has also been “re-designed” by making text alignment non-workable. I think I’ve sent feedback twice on this, but I guess Google is too busy on more “beautiful improvements”.
Even that great promoter of user-friendliness gives great features and takes away great features. Once upon a time Apple worked very hard on ease of use. Now they seem more concerned with “beautiful” document and spreadsheets. I’m sorry I don’t want charts with bubble points; I want a chart with connected dots.
Showing posts with label spreadsheet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spreadsheet. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
Tuesday, May 06, 2014
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
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.
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.
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