O MIcrosoft! How do I hate thee?
Maybe I shouldn't use a word as strong as hate.
Maybe loathe and despise are better words to use.
Over the years I have had to use your crappy packages because the companies I have worked for know no better than to have to pay for your garbage.
When I worked at Microsoft I had the misplaced opportunity to purchase a legal copy of your last halfway decent Windows - XP and the current MS Office 2007 Ultimate for a reasonable price.
About two and a half years ago my Outlook 2007 failed. I don't remember what the symptoms were but they were severe enough for me to install Thunderbird and run that instead. It ran successfully for six months until my desktop computer bluescreened and died. The hard drive did not fail but the XP did!!!
I had to reformat my hard drive and reinstall all my programmes. Fortunately, I had performed a backup of all my documents a week before and I discovered a fantastic package named PANDORA with I which resurrected 95% of my documents.
Now my Outlook 2007 has failed AGAIN!!!!!! IT has changed its settings without a by your leave from me and refuses point-blank to download my e-mails. This time I will install Thunderbird and leave MS Outlook in the trash where it belongs. Microsoft's "help" does not and no one ever comes back from MS to even offer solutions.
I seldom use the other packages in the MS Office 2007 suite other than Excel and sometimes Word (which is about as user-friendly as a rabid pitbull). When someone sends me a powerpoint file I will read it in powerpoint BUT I never use powerpoint, Access, Publisher, Groove, Infopath or Onenote because I have absolutely NO use for them. There are so many far more useful FREE packages available on the internet.
I purchased a laptop last year because the genealogy programme was conflicting with the my OCR package. AND neither supplier would willingly offer solutions other than to tell me to upgrade (at a price) to their new version. That laptop came installed with Windows 7 starter (another useless apology for a platform). It also came with MS OFFICE 2010 loaded - not installed.
The first thing I did was uninstall/unload MS OFFICE 2010 and load Apache OPEN OFFICE 3.4.0.
I have not looked back, in fact I so enjoy working on a package which does not crash that I am now going to remove MS OFFICE 2007 from my desktop computer and carry on using the Open Office 3.4.1. Even my 1998 OCR package talks to Open office. AND open office does everything MS OFFICE does with more quiet efficiency like removing itself from the RAM when I have finished using it.
