Thinking About Microsoft

Beating up on Microsoft and picking them apart is nothing new. It's a religious right on any given day. I am primarily a Mac user, so I'm not one to drink the "Microsoft Kool-Aid." But there are some important to remind and encourage people about with certain products. Specifically, I'm talking about Microsoft Office.

MS Office is something that Microsoft does very right, especially Excel. I like to think of Excel as the "Swiss Army" knife of software. The application in and of itself is awesome. You can easily use it in a variety of ways. The obvious it calculations and formulas. The other is as a flat file database. You can do some really cool stuff that on the surface seems simple, but in reality can be a little mind bending. I can't tell you how many times I've used it to create and manage and been data through CSV files. I love that stuff. We don't talk enough about it.

As a matter of fact, people in tech world are famous for talking about how deep Adobe Photoshop is. But the truth be told, so is Excel. If you want to go in that direction, it's impressively deep in scope. I've seen some mind-blowing stuff that would meet the needs and demands of any serious business person. Unfortunately most people only use about 10 of the available feature set.

Word is Word. I've had friends write anything form novels to training manuals to automated forms. There are some interesting tools inside. You can do a heck of a lot more than design certificates with MS Word. The forms tool is pretty interesting to play with.

I'm not going to go into each application, but by now you have a feel for the direction I'm going in and what I'm talking about. The bottom line it that MS Office is something that the boys and girls at Redmond got right. If you look into it, you can find some cool stuff. Apple has a famous phrase. "Think Different." It would not be a false thing to apply towards the suite.

Let us know your thoughts. Happy computing!

Jaye

Productivity 2.0

There is a great article on "Zen Habits," on Productivity 2.0. The article does a terrific job in contrasting old (usually ineffectual thinking) vs. New School (high quality employee output. Give it a read. There are some really excellent points in there.

Jaye

Styles Change, Style Doesn't

Gotta love the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Enjoy.



// Jaye

A Little Disappointment in Life

Recently I got a hold of a string of applications from the iTunes Apps store that just plain stink. From my perspective it wouldn't be so bad if they where free, but that's not the case.

A great example of sucking badly is TextGuru. It should be called Text-AntiTech-Counter-intuitive-Piece-of-Crap. First the reviews in the kindness light where miss-informed on the "ease of use factor," and at worst flat-out lies. It did not work as advertised which brings back my argument for trial-ware. It can certainly be done and I have no idea why it's not.

Text-Guru is supposed to allow you to "seamlessly" allow you to connect with your iPhone and move, share and edit basically any file format. Wrong. I still to this day have not been able to get the file transfer to work, despite being a pretty darn good geek, and in existing word documents you lose cut and paste functionality. The only documents that you can actually cut and paste are text files. That blows. They left out that little invaluable tidbit of information. There are a bunch of other clumsy things about the app and I'm not very happy. Why? Because if it happened once, I'd say okay, but it's happened multiple times.

Several other "Apps That Suck?" Ummmmm Chef, Pick & Choose Groceries, ATT Yellow Pages, What's On, Where and a few others but as I write, I'm just getting more upset. It's just too mind bending.

So to keep this from being a full on rant, Apple needs to do something about the process. As I said above, allow for trial-ware for goodness sake. Show little demo's movies, something. Come on this is the tech age. You can make our lives easier.

Jaye