It came to my attention while writing this piece that it can be summed up with two main points:

• Defaulting to string-based search without some sort of smarts and support for booleans sucks, and:
• Not including features in a mainstream product because you’re afraid it will take money from your upmarket products, when a reasonable number of your mainstream products client base will find something else to use isn’t smart

I’ve been using MS Office (specifically Outlook, Word and Excel) much more than I’d like to the last few days.

These are archaic (totally unrelated, but I’ll use this time to link to a complete stranger’s absolutely awesome blog), poorly designed and completely unfriendly ‘tools’.

The problem is it seems they were spec’ed out 15 years ago, and their specifications were never updated. Like, “Word is a word processor, let’s make it the best word processor we can.” is what they repeat every time a review of the product’s future comes up. In that respect yes, Word is indeed faster and more feature rich than pen-on-paper and the old Panasonic electronic keyboard I had when I went off to University.

It’s also slower, clumsier, less customizable, less powerful and more unusable than it should be, and probably in comparison to a best-of-breed cheaper, freeware or opensource competitor for any task you choose.

I’ll start off by saying that I’ve never taken Word training. I’ve probably had more schooling than the average person in it, and I’ve probably logged more professional hours using it than most. So while I know that some of the limitations I’ve experienced with it are likely possible to overcome, the truth is I don’t know how to do it, and that’s the problem (if the program’s help system was in any way helpful I wouldn’t be complaining – but Windows help is a joke, you get better results asking Google most times).

First off, Word was designed to write documents to be printed out, it’s awesome at that (like WordPerfect, OpenOffice, AbiWord, Google Documents and probably a billion other packages). It sucks at everything else.

Here’s what’s up, the world of documents and document processing has progressed lightyears beyond printing something out on paper. Word might be a great way to type stuff out, but it’s a terrible way to try and read something that isn’t meant to be processed in a strictly linear fashion. Take, for example Microsoft’s own help system, or most online manuals.

My other problem with Word is that it doesn’t even pretend to support any interesting page layout features for fear it takes money away from their horrid Publisher (or whatever it’s called now) product.

With Outlook, why doesn’t it support meta comments? How many times have I thought of something that I want to remember, but don’t want to put it in the body of the e-mail? Lots. For example, say someone asks me to provide them with certain information I’m not sure they should have, and I ask someone else for that information in another e-mail, now I might not want to share that information with the person I’m communicating right off the bad, but I might want to make a note of it in the future, well, how do I do that and attach that note to the e-mail? You can probably do it, but it’s not self-evident (I know, there’s a comments feature for Word docs – Word being Outlooks default HTML client but that isn’t really too user friendly).

For sure Microsoft thinks that such a feature is ‘too CRM-ish’ and they want to keep people from getting such features with their mainstream products, but golly, when the freeware has something you don’t, you’ve got to learn more tricks.

Excel should support more automated rules (like looking for the same text next to a date field to add up a third column, which was a problem I had today) and more intelligence, it’s too hard to program macros and scripts as it is. Also, why on earth does it open a new Workbook (as opposed to Worksheet) whenever you open a file? And why, why does it act as though each Workbook is its own instance of Excel in the taskbar, but close the one running instance of Excel when you close one of the taskbar ‘instances’? That’s terrible design.

Anyway, Microsoft, listen to me. Start researching ways to make your products better. Stop thinking about killing the competition and look at what your customers want to do and design your programs around them. No, don’t look at what your customers want to do and then design your marketing around them, stop saying that version x.x of something supports something and then have it not work.

Or you’ll find that the customers are going to start using the right tools for the job.

Categories: Work
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