Review by brainout

UPDATE to review, 2/12/13: yes you CAN make MS Office 2002-2000 run in Win7, if Win7 is previously installed. I just installed both on my Dell laptops (Lat 6530 and 6510) which I just bought in January. In PC World, they maintain you can also install those same MS versions in Win8, but I’m so antagonistic to Win8 I’ve not installed it, yet. Original review follows below.

==================nnImagine, if you will, the annual How-to-Alienate-the-Customer Meeting in Redmond, Washington, aka ‘upgrade’ plan, for MS software.

Ms. Snippy (proudly): Well, we’ve redesigned the interface yet again, just like aisles in grocery stores, so the customer will be confused, feel stupid; so will subscribe to our paid help. Yet we added a cute dog to slow the search process, make it harder to search than prior; we also reduced the number and types of files search can read, and made the Indexing Service more annoying. We also forced the interface colors to glare blue and glare white, to increase eyestrain. Thus we can truly call this product ‘new’.

Mr. Fleece-the-Customer Project Manager (smiling): Wonderful, Snippy! But is that all? Those changes won’t confuse the customer long enough; soon they will stop subscribing to our ignorant help hot lines.

Ms. Snippy (bubbling over): Oh, we’ve done much more. Starting with, reducing backwards-compatibility with our own earlier software, and popular programs like Lotus 1-2-3 and Adobe Acrobat; so now it will cost those companies more, to sync with our ‘new’ software. And less of their own products, will be read by OUR software, just the same!nnMr. Fleece (eyes wide): aha, so we can blame them for lack of compatibility, and make more money thereby. Well done, Snippy!nnMs. Snippy (ecstatic): Well, here’s the best part: we create NEW JOBS! For now ALL the older material must be retyped or reformatted within our own products, thousands of hours of NEW WORK spent on old material which used to be converted in an instant! That extra work, is good for America!nnMr. Fleece (with the Arm-and-Hammer look): yes, teaches the customer a lesson that he shouldn’t go anywhere but to us! for all his software needs.

Ms. Nudger (sheepishly): Um, excuse me. We’ve also made our own earlier products incompatible with the ‘new’ version. So how do we blame the other software companies, when in fact we also are incompatible with our own products?nnMr. Fleece: Can’t you recognize ‘progress’? It’s the policy here to force people to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, never ending, never matching, never fitting the past – just like DETROIT proudly does with American cars! You’re UNAMERICAN, Nudger; and you’re FIRED!nn===========nnThe above fictional conversation is not wholly fictional. Eleven years ago, my one and only pay-for-help hour spent with a Microsoft employee basically resulted in him admitting Fleece’s last lines. In the name of progress. I kid you not. The rest of the fictional conversation is easily deduced by the actual history of MS products. So too, here with Word 2003, when the elimination of backwards-compatibility, really begins. Later versions of Office are even worse. I’ve tried and rejected them. But after reading reviews of how Word 2003 allegedly fixed the bugs with respect to right-to-left text (i.e., Hebrew), I wanted to try this. Yeah, what a mistake! Two copies I bought, both of them nearly useless!nnWhy? Um, if you can’t even retrieve your own previous files in the ‘upgrade’ version, then why upgrade? Hmmmm?nnFor every ‘upgrade’ of Office becomes more and more dysfunctional. I bought Word 2003 due to the many bugs in Word 2000-2002, but guess what? Word 2003 TOOK AWAY what was good in those older programs, and substituted even more bugs and dysfunctionality. That ‘progress’ continues from Word 2003, onward. OFFICE and hence Word 2010 is so incompatible, after downloading the trial version in only two hours I was so frustrated, I uninstalled it. With difficulty.

Here’s the scam: the ‘upgrades’ are like the opening dialogue, above. The ‘upgrades’ complicate procedures which were simple in earlier versions, especially in Word and Excel, prior to version 2003. For example, you used to just click on Help, and you actually got a chm file OF Help. Not now. Now, the DEFAULT in Word takes you ONLINE. Takes two hours to figure out how to change that default, so you can get the old help file you’re used to. So too, the ? in a dialogue box USED to function simply: you clicked on the ?, then moved your mouse to the section on the dialogue box you wanted to understand, and got a semi-coherent explanation of that section’s function. Not now. Now, another dialogue box opens with a lot more text, and you must SCROLL SCROLL SCROLL to find the item you could have gotten in 2 seconds, under the old method. With no more coherence, of course. Often, even less. Help like this: if the dialogue box says ‘make operation operational’, of course you have no idea what ‘operation’ is in view. So in the old days, you clicked on ? and you got a tool tip which said, ‘this function makes the operation, operational’. That of course elucidated nothing, but at least it was fast. Now, in Word 2003, you get the same message, but it took you three or four minutes to even FIND the same line of text as in the dialogue box, within the new and de-proved help file. That is, after you spent two hours figuring out how to turn off the default ONLINE help which of course never helped you, either.

It’s not by accident that most law firms still offer backwards-compatible documents for Word97-2003. They have to. Legal and accounting stuff has to be kept for YEARS. Notice the range of the offering. 2003 and prior. Word 2003, however, is far less desirable than prior versions: its clipboard is worse, its buttons are harder to customize and actually they removed some useful button customizations like Reveal Formatting; the PERMISSION annoyance (covered below) means you might have to go through all your old documents and establish permissions, even on your own computer (problem on XP Pro, not Home). And frankly, I don’t see any functions which are improved, versus Word 2002. Only new annoyances.

The usual company retort to complaints like mine, is to deem the customer ignorant of computers, puh! Balderdash. I’ve been working with computers since Trash-80. I still have my old 286’s, and they still work. Admirably. So it’s not like I’m a computer neophyte, and my business depends on word processing and spreadsheets. To date, nothing beats Multimate II (a DOS product) for merges, and DOS (not Windows) Lotus 1-2-3 version 2.x, for calculations. All Excel has to offer, is formatting the final product.

To wit: oh, now in Excel 2003, you can’t retrieve Lotus 1-2-3 wk1 files, but get a ‘restricted policy’ notice. By the way, this very ‘policy’ is itself buggy. If I use XP Home, I don’t get the problem. It only occurs with XP Pro. See? MS products don’t work with each other. That lone $90 hour I spent paying for MS help years ago, resulted in this gem of explanation: each programmer only gets certain subroutines to write. The programmers are isolated, and don’t get to see how the product fits together. So OF COURSE there will be bugs. Design requires a wholistic approach, which at MS, is anathema. Okay, then: their products will waste billions of dollars in customer time trying to work around the bugs. Not to mention, eventually MS will tank due to such a stupid policy. But I digress…

Back to the problem: you can’t open your own files when you are the administrator? And you’re not told how to get permission? Oh, wait: you can ONLY get permission if you use Microsoft’s ONLINE PASSPORT SERVICE? Access to your own computer not online, depends on you establishing credentials online? Oh but yes! You download a silly ‘rights management’ program which you can’t even install, unless you subscribe to NET passport ONLINE, which means to access your own files on your own computer to use them in Office, you have to BE online, establish your credentials, and only THEN can you open your own documents on your own computer. What drunk thought of that? And of course, if MS voluntarily ends the PASSPORT program, then you can’t even do that convoluted and needless procedure to open your own documents on your own computer offline.

So MS won’t even allow you the administrator to control your own computer, with Word 2003. So here’s the scam workaround: you have to settle for XP Home, or contact them in Redmond; of course you wait for an hour on the phone, then for $90 per hour they will be happy to spend four more hours ‘helping’ you to solve THEIR OWN TYRANNICAL BUG. Of course, the ‘help’ person at MS knows absolutely nothing about the software, so first you go through irrelevant questions like do you have a virus, in order to eat up time and cost you more money.

Forget the other junk in the Suite. It works not at all. The Outlook 2003 was so badly designed I just flat removed it.

Excel is totally retarded, for audit-trail accounting. Everything about its structure is buggy and arcane. I spent FOUR HOURS today, just trying to figure out why it wouldn’t recognize a labelled number, as a LABEL. Previous version of Excel had the opposite bug: if you typed in a number, it automatically treated it as a label, unless you put an equals or plus or minus sign in front of the number. Sheesh. But at least Excel 2002 and prior, would recognize the label marker and treat what followed AS a label. (This matters: say you’re doing billing like I was, and you wanted to LABEL a billing amount, to keep it out of your totals; in Excel 2002 and prior, you can do that easily. But NOT, in Excel 2003, and no FUNCTION formula will let you do it. More could be said, but then I’ll have apoplexy.)nnBy contrast, old DOS Lotus 1-2-3 version 2.x – which IBM owns now, and won’t sell – along with its add-in (nee: Funk Software) ‘Worksheet Utilities’ is totally superior, especially for actuarial and other number-intensive, date-intensive, audit-trail-intensive calculations. Runs in a DOS window in XP, and I’m told by my computer guys that I can get a DOS window in Win7, so might upgrade to Win7. Whew. Calculation in our modern computers is instantaneous. DOS rocks. So too, that version of Lotus. Later versions don’t work well with dates. Forget the later Quattro Pro, too.

Excel’s only good for formatting the final reports, and even then inanely won’t let you store print STYLES without extreme effort: you do it by setting up your windows, print area, then name the whole thing as a CUSTOM VIEW. Forget macros.

I could spend hours ranting about the flaws in Word or Office Professional, vintage 2010 backwards. Word is totally incapable of a decent merge, for example. The trouble you have to go to in order to make merging work in Word, means that unless you’ve got thousands of records, you might as well do it by hand. And with thousands of records, count on half of them coming out wrong unless yhou spend thousands of hours designing a very precise database which is thirty times harder to manage, versus the old DOS days. Unbelievable. No wonder prices rise so much. We’re all spending downtime trying to get basic word processing functions, to work!nnSo too, forget Front Page; it’s easier to write your own html code in Word. Business Contact Manager? You’re better off with pencil and paper! Access? Someone on crack designed it. The Photo thingy isn’t all that bad, but its bugs abound. Outlook 2003 is the worst. They removed all the flexibility of earlier Outlook versions, and of course made the interface completely frustrating, to boot. Outlook has always been way overcomplicated, but if you have a lot of stuff to juggle and you use it daily (which you must, or you’ll forget how) – it can be helpful. Simpler is old Sidekick in DOS. Sigh, you can’t store it in the UMB, in Windows. But it works just fine on an old 486…

So instead of reading only my ranting – Google on a MS program name, add the word ‘sucks’ – you’ll find even whole discussion forums devoted to that second word. Usually such vulgar language is inapt. But not here. Every swear word ever invented, belongs to Office products and to MS software in general. It’s deliberately unintuitive, confusing, buggy and mediocre, so you have to subscribe to paid help. That’s the only explanation which makes sense of the data. Same can be said for Adobe, Roxio, Symantec and Corel products. So MS isn’t the only scammer in town.

Go back to DOS software: its products work well on these faster machines.

===============nnUPSHOT: If you are lonely and want to spend all your free time debugging MS Office gaffes, then buy Word 2003 or Office Professional 2003 et seq. If on the other hand you like me are stuck with Word and want to know the latest version which worked – though buggy, is manageable – get Office 2002 or 2000. Best was Word97, but getting it to work in XP is something of a problem. Hope you kept your Win98SE machines. :)nnSo now, I just uninstalled Word 2003, and go back to Word 2002. At least they don’t prohibit you from accessing your own files! Gotta install it now, byeeee.