Lotus 1-2-3 rocked.
Posted on 08/11/2024 7:04:49 PM PDT by 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. ®
Lotus 123 was better IMHO.
I loved the backslash commands.
Excel=VHS, Lotus=Betamax.
Is this written by a human? I often mess up by not proof reading, but it seems something went wrong here.
The print macros were so much easier to write if you kept the exhibits in a sheet the same size. a1..k55~, a61..k115, etc. and then aa1..ak55~. etc.
Everything that Bill Gates touches is rubbish. The only thing in question is how bad that rubbish is.
And as a side note, I was a public school teacher when Gates introduced his Gates Foundation public school initiative. It was anti-white racist garbage. I quietly refused to participate. And luckily I was not caught before I was able to retire.
I learned on Lotus 123. Excel copied it.
Lotus 123 was better IMHO.
Notice how almost all names in the spreadsheet are American. No strange foreign names.
My MS Excel for Mac v16.87, Microsoft 365 Subscription has quite a few awful bugs. None have caused data loss and they are mainly annoyances with correct screen display, formatting, and data entry, but they drive me crazy. Excel has always had perpetual bugs that they never fix.
Back then I was using Lotus. That was before the PC’s had enough RAM to support Software Bloat.
Later, for about 5 years I lived in Excel with ASAP Utilities. Very powerful stuff.
At the time I found an open source spread sheet that could use Regular Expressions. It was useful too.
Now, look at Bill Gates. He is still into Covid and World Health. (which he really knows nothing about)
Microsoft is rubbish. Beats me why the world uses it.
Agree. Lotus was fast and friendly. Not bloated.
“Everything that Bill Gates touches is rubbish.”
Agree. Today we are dying from complexity.
Fiklore… Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretti nasti...
I thought the operating system was copied from something before Mac.
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