Received today from a colleague:
Please note that if somebody opens Build log excel in Microsoft excel 2007 and updates it while a filter put on any column, the file crashes.
So please avoid updating the build log in Microsoft excel 2007.
So we're talking about a fairy simple file created in Excel 2003 that crashes Excel 2007 if you try to update it while a filter is set on any column... Sigh...
I am at my mum's for Easter and one of the first things she asked me to look at had to do with her computer. She had this document that she wrote using Microsoft Works aeons ago that she wanted to open again. Of course, she's now using Microsoft Word and Word has no idea how to open Works files, even though both products are produced from the same software company.
What to do? The answer is very simple but rather counter-intuitive for people not used to open source software: LibreOffice. From the point of view of someone who lives in a world where closed source is the norm, how can a free office wannabe solve a problem that the mighty MS Office can't solve? Simple: as highlighted by Michael Meeks at FOSDEM earlier this year, LibreOffice wants to have the largest possible list of supported file formats so that they can support their users in reading their old documents stored in long forgotten format and hopefully migrate them to modern and preferably open document formats. As a result, LibreOffice supports MS Works and MS Word out of the box.
So back to my mum's document, retrieving the content was then very easy: copy the document to a USB key, open it on my laptop using LibreOffice, save it again and copy the new document back to her PC. In this case, it meant saving it back as an MS Word document. In an ideal world, I would have saved it as ODF and installed LibreOffice on her computer but I'll leave that for another day.
So if you have any old document lying around that you can't open anymore, try LibreOffice first, you'll be surprised how many weird and wonderful formats it supports. If it still doesn't work, consider contributing a filter to the project or at least reporting the issue and providing sample files so that the developers can build such a filter.
In the meaningless error category, let me present today's effort by Microsoft Outlook:
Following Leap Day last Friday and the confusion this seemed to generate, it looks like the problem is even worse that originally thought, especially where Microsoft products are concerned. And reading the comments on that Register article, it looks like they are not the only ones.
Via The Register.
One of the reasons why I keep a Windows laptop used to be that the HSBC online business banking site required Internet Explorer or an antiquated version of Netscape so I couldn't use it on my Mac. They recently changed their authentication mechanism and out of curiosity I tried it again with Firefox today. It works perfectly both on Windows and OS-X. So that's now one less reason to keep the Windows laptop. Thank you HSBC.
I just opened Microsoft Messenger, something that I hadn't done for a few weeks and it came with a message saying that there was a new version available for Mac and that I must upgrade
(emphasis mine). This is one of the things I hate most with Microsoft: there is no choice, we must do things their way if we want to use their software or services.
