Quote of the day - Ease of use

"Everything syncs without us having to think about it." - Apple CEO Steve Jobs, 2011-06-06, on introducing iCloud

Hey Steve!  How about coming to my house and think about syncing my iPod and MacBook Pro?  I have spent I don't know how many hours trying to restore dropped calendars and contacts or remove duplicate entries in either.

Maybe it's Microsoft's fault.  These problems seem to have started when I switched from Office 2008 to Office 2011.  Microsoft replaced Entourage in the former with Outlook in the latter.  Similar software, but as usual, the new improved version can be several steps backward.

I don't know how many times I've searched in Apple's and Microsoft's support pages.  Lots and lots of people report the problem, but few people, if any, answer with a solid long term solution.  I've tried some, and some have worked for a while.  But like the infamous cat, it always comes back.

I've called AppleCare and got some advice that sort of helped. But the cat came back.

I looked in Apple's support pages and did find a more detailed solution.  It sort of seems to have worked, but I had duplicates going back to 2002, like 20 Christmas days on the same day and six voice lessons on the same day.  I've spent well over an hour eliminating the duplicates in 2002.  At least for the holidays I won't have to delete duplicates in later years, but all those other activities, it remains to be seen.

Also, I don't know what the side effects of deleting ALL the files in the cache folder.  There was stuff for TurboTax, Google Earth, Adobe, and I've forgotten what else.  At least they are backed up on my Time Machine.

Ah!  Time Machine, that marvelous hourly backup in the background.  Background? Hah!  When the backup is busy for over an hour, lots of other things slow down and certainly make me think about it.

No, I'm not going to go over to the dark side.  Microsoft Office is enough.

But I certainly wish you would run a company that is more efficient than the IRS, which contrary to Republican doctrine, does a nice job of co-operating with private companies to make reporting and refunds quick.

P.S. Thanks to the messed up composing page in Google's Blogger, I couldn't post this right away.  Or maybe it was because Apple's instructions to delete the cache.  I fixed the problem by quitting and restarting Firefox.

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".