Techie Told 'Bill Gates' Excel Is Rubbish – and the Microsoft Boss Had it Fixed in 48 Hours

The Register ^ | Fri 9 Aug 2024 | Simon Sharwood

[nickcarraway]

I'm a Mac. I'm a PC. You're both annoying me

On Call The Register knows that tech support is a vocation that induces frustration, which is why each Friday we offer a new edition of On Call – the reader-contributed column that details real-life support stories so you can at least enjoy misery in company.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Brad" who told us about his first tech support job, for a grocery retailer based in a major US city.

Brad spent most of his time at the company's biggest store, but a few times a week was despatched to other outposts.

"My boss gave me a lot of leeway so long as I kept the PCs running," Brad told On Call – perhaps because that worthy had a degree in Psychology, not tech.

Brad was therefore not able to turn to his boss for help on the finer points of things like testing software before major deployments.

Yet Brad was asked to do the latter: the story he sent On Call dates back to 1996 when he was asked to move the retailer from Microsoft Office 95/7.0 which was proving unstable when running large spreadsheets.

See? Excel hell is eternal! But we digress …

A move to Office 97/8.0 was on the agenda, and one day a package containing eight floppy disks arrived.

Brad got to work using those floppies to install Microsoft's latest suite and test it as thoroughly as he could. A few weeks later, the Mac version of the suite arrived, and he tested that too.

Satisfied that both versions worked, he procured appropriate licenses, arranged things so users would not be at their desks on a Friday afternoon, and started the upgrade.

For the next 48 hours, Brad wore out the carpet carrying those floppies as he installed Office on over a hundred PCs in different offices.

On Monday morning, he arrived at work and prepared to bask in praise for a job well done.

And that's when the complaints about corrupted Excel files started to arrive.

Brad frantically conducted more tests and found the cause: a spreadsheet created on a PC could be read on a Mac, but once the Mac opened it, Windows users would see only gobbledygook.

"I could see my job flashing before my eyes if I didn't find a solution quickly," Brad told On Call.

His first action was an all-hands email advising colleagues to avoid shifting spreadsheets between OSes. But he couldn't find an actual fix, other than returning to Office 7.

So frustrating was that prospect that Brad sent "a quite angry email" to billg@microsoft.com – assuming that was the best way to contact Microsoft founder Bill Gates. "I expressed how upset I was at this obvious bug and essentially accused Bill of beta testing his software on the public," Brad told On Call.

When Brad arrived at work the next morning, on the stroke of 09:00 his phone rang. He answered, and was greeted by a Microsoft developer who wanted to help.

The Microsoftie spent an hour conversing with Brad to learn how the problem manifested, his attempts at remediation, and anything else that might help.

"To this day I have never met a person so desperate to understand and help with a problem," Brad told On Call.

The Microsoft techie signed off with a pledge to offer a solution – soon.

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation Stop installing that software – you may have just died Brad showed up again the next day and found a package on his desk: disks containing Microsoft Office 8.01 along with a letter "assuring me they had been able to isolate the issue and that this version would resolve the problem once it was installed on the Macs."

Macs were in the minority at the retailer where Brad worked, so he had the upgrade sorted by lunchtime. Over the next week he got around to installing the update on the company's Windows boxes, too.

"In the end, I was sure I'd probably hit the email address I'd been hoping for on the head and Bill Gates had likely made clear his frustration as well," Brad mused.

Thankful for the rapid help, Brad decided to send a thank you note to the same address.

He now regrets that mail.

"I realized that instead of just sending the thank you, I should have followed it up with a question: 'Do you need anyone in your QA department?'"

And in his message to On Call, he suggested others might like to make the same offer in their correspondence with CrowdStrike.

Has an industry luminary helped you to support their faulty products? Go on, spill your celebrity goss by clicking here to send On Call an email. ®

[KarlInOhio]

Those are links to other stories put in the middle of this one and the poster didn't remove them. In the article it looks like:

... The Microsoft techie signed off with a pledge to offer a solution – soon.

MORE CONTEXT

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project
Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it
Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation
Stop installing that software – you may have just died

Brad showed up again the next day and found a package on his desk: ....

[Tellurian]

I still use lotus 123 with windows 10 and 11

Wow. Last time I used 123 was on my Commodore 64.

[BB62]

The commands were initiated with slash, not backslash.

[Organic Panic]

I am stuck using that wretched company. All the collaborations (monopolizing) he does forces several software packages I use all have to work in the M$ environment. For example I have 20 years of design tables and formulas in spreadsheets that must be run with excel to work with my engineering software,. Add to that and the customers I have all have their “security” based in M$ so I am stuck until I retire. Since DOS I have been using that crap.

[Gaffer]

Yep....it was a crude ripoff of Lotus.

[fishtank]

My favorite Lotus platform!!! https://www.hpmuseum.net/images/200LXscreen-35.jpg

[Dr. Sivana]

I learned on Lotus 123. Excel copied it.

When Lotus sued PaperBack Software and Mosaic for VP-Planner and Twin, they explicitly stated that Excel was NOT a copy of Lotus 1-2-3. Yeah, they are both spreadsheets, and 1-2-3 was MUCH faster on a PC because it stuck everything in RAM and was written in Assembler in the early versions.

But Excel is no more a copy of 1-2-3 than 1-2-3 is a copy of T-Maker.

Complain about Excel all you want, and when I work on Excel files in LibreOffice Calc, it is often locked when I open it up in a Windows boot session (a milder version of what the author complained of). Still, unlike the '80s, no modern spreadsheet is as capable, certainly not in Linux land. In the '80s, Quattro Pro could compete on the Windows side, and Trapeze and Claris Resolve on the Mac side. Don't forget Lotus Improv on the NeXT! I would love to see a reboot of Improv, but the buyer from IBM of Lotus Software, HCL contracting, is an unlikely candidate to revive Improv, Symphony, 1-2-3, or Jazz.

[jimtorr]

I thought the operating system was copied from something before Mac.

Apple copied from Xerox, then MS tried to copy from Xerox also, then copied from Apple to make to work. MS paid a very large fine to Apple for the copy.

[Dr. Sivana]

It copied Excel from Lotus, Word from Word Perfect, Windows from Macs, etc etc.

The early versions of Windows were quite different than Macintosh OS. GEM was another windowing environment, and Unix had X Window System.

Microsoft Word for DOS is pretty old and WordPerfect was probably still running on Data General when it came out. It is its own thing, though it probably resembled MultiMate more than WordPerfect, Wordstar, or the horrific IBM DisplayWriter.

Microsoft didn't even attempt to make a Word Processor as elegant and powerful as WordPerfect. Unfortunately, the WordPerfect paradigm did not translate well into GUI systems, and SSI/WordPerfect Corp. ultimately had to abandon using assembler for WP. Some would say XYwrite and Nota Bene are even more powerful. Nota Bene still has a following among academics just as WordPerfect still has a niche in the legal world, despite Corel's best efforts.

Microsoft did pay Corel to stop making a Linux version of WordPerfect, which is the greater sin.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Oh, that looks familiar.

I got a job in the mid-2000s partly because I knew QuattroPro. My first day they put a floppy (not a CD, not a 3.5, a 5 1/4 Floppy) on my desk and told me that they needed me to "maintain this spreadsheet" on a computer that came out of the ark. They use it to compile the data they needed to send in their daily reports. It had not been updated for at least a decade. They had products on it that no one in the facility was even sure when they were last made.

It was, needless to say, not Y2K compliant. How they managed to keep their government contracts I will never know.

[Paal Gulli]

""I expressed how upset I was at this obvious bug and essentially accused Bill of beta testing his software on the public,..."

That is precisely Gates' implementation of the 90/10 rule. Fix 90% of problems developers document and put the product on sale. Don't worry about fixing the remaining 10% unless and until customers complain.

[noiseman]

Microsoft Word has a horrible bug that has been there for years and never gets fixed. When I pause my typing for a moment and then go back to resume where I left off, Word frequently moves the insertion point to a random location in the document, which means that it takes a second to realize that what I am typing is now appearing somewhere else in the document instead of where I had my cursor. Same goes for backspacing to delete text. You think you’re deleting text where you placed your cursor, but instead it’s deleting text somewhere else, usually out of the frame so that you can’t see what it’s doing.

I’ve read every tip I can find on this problem, and none of them fix it. The most common one is to claim that if using a laptop (which I am) you must have inadvertently brushed the touchpad and accidentally moved the cursor that way. I have done very careful tests in which I make sure my hands never touch the touchpad while typing, and it still happens. I start to type a sentence, then pause. I can see my cursor blinking right where I stopped typing. I then resume typing, only to see nothing happening where I left the cursor, and after searching around the document I find that it has for no reason jumped to a random spot in the document and all of my new text is appearing there.

This happens frequently, many times each day, and I have experienced it over the years in many different revisions of Word and on completely different computers, including both desktops and laptops. It’s absolutely maddening, but Microsoft just never fixes it.

[steve86]

Many Android apps feature that sort of annoyance also.

[FreedomPoster]

DOS isn’t done until Lotus won’t run.

[daniel1212]

Those are links to other stories put in the middle of this one and the poster didn't remove them. In the article it looks like:

Carelessly copying and pasting seems to be a FR tradition (yet I often post my own jumbled text due to lack of proof reading), and thus I offered this: An exhortation to those who post thread (normally post as much of the meat of the article as allowed, describe videos, etc.)

[joe fonebone]

Oh I remember the lotus/excel wars quite well....
On our system, people had to log onto lotus as lotus users, or lusers...
That translates into losers.....lol