I hate MS Excel
Thu Mar 23 23:50:00 EST 2006
Has anyone else ever been utterly frustrated with Microsoft Excel? Let me tell you how annoyed I was. It is actually a good thing I didn't write this post Tuesday or it may have had some profanity in it. All I wanted to do was some graphing, but for the life of me I couldn't get the graph "wizard" do do what I wanted. Maybe it is just because I was a math person, but the lame brain terminology in Excel was driving me to baldness. By default the "data range" is all the data, which didn't make any sense to me, but I tried it. The graph looked terrible. In my book range = Y values, so I changed the "data range" to be the Y values I wanted on my chart. No go. Eventually I found that the only way to get a graph like I wanted was to use a Pivot Chart, and a Pivot Table. And then the stupid interface insisted on putting the word "Sum of" in front of my numbers. I tried erasing the words sum of an got an error about how that value already existed. Anyway . . . Two days later and my desire to strangle somebody (preferably somebody responsible for Excel) has subsided.
It turns out I was able to get what I wanted on some later graphs, but only if I used the scatter plot type. I'm not sure why the data means different things to Excel when you change chart type, but don't argue with Bill. The most maddening thing was the help. The stupid paper clip would come up and offer to help. I said "What is a series?" and the answer it gave was "select your series values and input them here" or some lame answer like that. I better not get started. I feel the animosity returning.
How did Microsoft become so dominant anyway? I grew up with Wordstar, then Wordperfect. I never used MS Word until I got my first job after graduate school. At the time I was shocked to find out that businesses used Microsoft products. I thought they were just for students and home users. That was a quick education. There are still a lot of things I prefer about Wordperfect and the other products in the suite, but Wordperfect was the Russia of the features race and couldn't keep up. There were too many bugs and Microsoft's proprietary file format kept changing so that it was impossible to save a .doc file from Wordperfect and have it work in Microsoft or to do decent imports either. What a pain. OpenOffice is my friend. At least at home I can make logical decisions about the software I choose to use.
