(e-mail address removed) wrote...
i dont care if they've been tested in court.
Ah, the strength of your moral outrage will overcome all obstacles.
Grow up!
Microsoft is screwing customers. And I'm sick and fucking tired of it.
Are they the first company to be accused of doing so?!
Grow up!!
START FIXING YOUR BUGS MICROSOFT AND STOP TRYING TO SELL US 3 NEW
VERSIONS OF OFFICE IN 3 YEARS
It's 3 versions in 4 years if you mean 2000 through 2003.
As I wrote before, Microsoft's goal is MONEY, not accolades for their
products. As long as crap sells, Microsoft will sell crap.
I mean-- seriously here Microsoft-- a bunch of drunk and blind
preschoolers could make a spreadsheet program that is easier to get
data in and out of.
Not cynical enough! Their programmers are quite capable of fixing most
of what's wrong in Excel or Access or the rest of Office. Their
managers, on the other hand, don't want to invest in such unprofitable
areas as improving software that sells quite well as-is. There's no ROI
on fixing anything in Office, so they're far more likely to add
blinking text to Excel and Access than to fix anything or (dare I even
imagine it!) add functionality. [Excel hasn't had a new worksheet
function added since Excel 97 or augmented since 2000. A few have been
fixed in 2002 and 2003, but nothing has been added.]
How about you make something that LOOKS JUST LIKE ACCESS DATA PROJECTS
but it is a piece of Excel.
You need to realize something. Queries built with Access's Query
Builder don't provide more than a fraction of what Access supports in
SQL queries, but most spreadsheet users don't know SQL (and you're
deluded if you believe it's easy for most people to learn quickly).
That said, it would indeed be nice to have a high-powered query
facility built directly into Excel *both* as a menu command (replacing
Microsoft Query, which is very underpowered) and as a worksheet
function (replacing SQL.REQUEST).
For that matter, it'd also be nice to have Edit > Find, Edit > Replace,
SEARCH, MATCH, {H|V}LOOKUP and SUBSTITUTE accept VBScript-like regular
expressions (like OpenOffice Calc accepts a somewhat weaker set of
regular expressions).
It'd be nice for LEFT, MID, RIGHT, REPLACE, SUBSTITUTE, FIND and SEARCH
to interpret negative positional arguments as right-to-left.
It'd be nice if Excel's object model included 3D references to make it
possible to pass arguments like first:last!A1:X99 to udfs.
It'd be nice to add a rendering layer to Excel to process standard HTML
formatting tags in cells' .Text properties, e.g., so formulas returning
something like
your result is: <B>100</B>
and display the portion outside the tags in the cell's given format but
the portion inside the tags in boldface.
Pipe dreams!!!
So everything that these monkeys are creating in hundreds of different
spreadsheets-- we can digest and spit out with a real reporting
platform.
Only hundreds?
Excel can't even print fixed-width stuff correctly.
Yes it can if you use monospace typefaces.
I mean-- Excel needs reporting abilities.
Here I disagree. Excel isn't well suited to generating canned reports.
Adding reporting features would make worksheet design more complicated,
while if reporting were generated outside of worksheets, few Excel
users would bother using it.
Access needs more Excel abilities-- like grabbing a range and you see a
subtotal.
And Excel needs to be a format that is easy to get data out of.
XML!
You may hate it, but it *IS* general and more open than anything else
anyone has come up with. And before you mention any dbms format, binary
images of dbms tables aren't standardized, nor are binary file formats
all that easy to deal with if they can't just be read using C-like
fscanf record parsing.
I dont think that XML is the answer to everything.. I mean-- you guys
are on crack.
....
So what else? XML is at least plain text, so no screwing around with
binary files or binary representations of numbers. And dealing with
hierarchies isn't all that difficult (though it is unlike anything
you'd be used in rdbms's).
