Enshittification forces me to sever my 30+ year relationship with Microsoft Office products.
I cancelled my Office 365 subscription today.
I didn’t think I’d ever drop Word and Excel. After all, I know these two applications better than any other on my computer.
Let’s see who’s selling me out.
I get a lot of email and much of it is spam. That’s why I have a special email account I use for anything that’s not important. It’s a disposable account. Every few years, I simply stop using it and create a new disposable account. Then I slowly but surely update my records where I need to. The spam virtually stops.
For a while.
Eventually, it builds up again and I’m back to the point where I need to delete that account and create a new one.
And don’t talk to me about spam filters. Yes, I have one in my email client. Yes, it does work. But no, it doesn’t catch it all and, unfortunately, it misidentifies too much as spam. So I can’t trust it.
The other day, while drivinge, I came up with a novel idea. Instead of creating one disposable email account, why not create one for each organization that asks for an email address? Then use that account for just that organization. And then, when the spam starts coming, I can easily identify its source — it’ll match the name of the account.
I own multiple domain names, each of which can have as many email addresses as I like. So there’s no limit to the number of addresses I can create. And I don’t even have to set them up in my email client software! I can simply check for mail on the web if I’m expecting something. And let it accumulate on a distant server if I’m not.
Sure, this email address is mine. But don’t expect me to monitor it for your junk.
I started this today. I decided to use Microsoft Excel for iPad to maintain my helicopter Hobbs book (a record of hours flown) and Due List (a record of when various maintenance items were last done and next due). In order to access an Excel file stored in Dropbox from my iPad — and be able to edit it — I had to create a Microsoft account. That account needed a valid email address. So I logged onto my server and created one named microsoft @ one of my many domain names. And I used that email address to create the account for Microsoft Excel. I checked the email on the web, got the code I needed to complete the account setup, and am done.
And I never have to see any junk from that account again.
But I can always look if I need to.
Let’s see how far I can take this. I’ll report back, maybe next year.
How I cranked up my blood pressure this morning.
Back in October 2010, while working on my Outlook book, I installed Microsoft Office 2011 on my old 15-in MacBook Pro. The installation process prompted me for a product key, which I found on the product packaging. The software then used my Internet connection to “activate” the software. The process worked without any problems and the software worked fine.
Fast forward to yesterday. I replaced the 100 GB hard disk in the computer with a 500 GB disk. Well, I didn’t replace it. A computer tech did. (It’s worth $100 for someone else to deal with all those tiny screws.) As part of the installation, he copied every file off the old hard disk to the new hard disk. When I started up the computer, it started just as if the old hard disk were still in there — but with a lot more free space.
The problem began when I launched Outlook. Microsoft presented me with a dialog that prompted me to enter a key code. It was as if I’d never registered it.
Now if I were in my office, this wouldn’t be a problem. That’s where the original disc and packaging is. But I wasn’t. I was in our Phoenix condo 100 miles away.
Easy, I figure. When I registered the software, I provided all kinds of identifying information. Microsoft could look this up and give me my key code.
So I go into online chat with someone from the Microsoft Store. He says he can’t help me, but gives me a toll-free number and series of menu choices to press.
I call the number and press the menu choices. I wait on hold about 5 minutes. I get connected to someone presumably at Microsoft. I tell him my story. He tells me that Customer Service could help me. He transfers me. I wait on hold for another 5 minutes. This time, I’m connected to an overseas support person. I tell her the same story. And this is where the real frustration begins.
She asks if I have the disc. I tell her I don’t. I tell her that if I had the disc, I wouldn’t have to call.
She asks for my order number. I tell her I don’t have my order number.
She asks me where I bought the software. I tell her it came directly from Microsoft.
She tells me she’s going to connect me to the Microsoft Store. I stop her and tell her that that’s who transferred me to her.
She asks again for the disc. I tell her I still don’t have it.
She asks again for the order number. I tell her I still don’t have it.
She tells me to call back when I have the disc in front of me. I tell her that if I had the disc in front of me, I wouldn’t have to call her.
She tells me she needs product information from the disc. I tell her what product I have.
I ask her why she can’t look up the information I provided when I registered the software. She tells me that they don’t keep that information. (Yeah. Right.)
She asks again for the disc. I begin to suspect that she doesn’t understand my situation. I ask to speak to someone who can understand me better.
She puts me on hold. I wait about 5 minutes. Then I’m disconnected.
This isn’t the first time I’ve wasted 30 minutes of my life dealing with Microsoft Customer Service. The last time, I had a copy of Windows XP in front of me and needed to know whether I’d already installed it on a computer. I knew I had an extra copy but wasn’t sure which one it was. I had all the key codes and other information they should need to answer this simple question, but after bouncing between two departments for 45 minutes and not getting anywhere, I hung up in frustration.
I compare this with Apple’s customer service, which is is pretty damn good.
Even Adobe was able to help me when I had a registration issue with Photoshop after my computer’s logic board was replaced. (By the way, Photoshop still works fine on the computer, despite the hard disk change.)
Looking back at all the years I’ve been using computers, it’s always Microsoft customer service or technical support that fails to provide the help I need to resolve an issue. First, it’s nearly impossible to find what might be the right phone number to call. Then, after navigating a phone tree, waiting on hold, and telling my story to someone, I invariably get transferred to someone else and need to go through the same process. Sometimes this is repeated until I realize I’m being transferred back and forth between the same two departments. Along the way, I have to deal with people who don’t speak English very well or are reading off scripts they’re not allowed to stray from. No one is ever helpful.
Why is this?
Many people don’t use Microsoft software because they hate the company so much. I can understand this.
I have to admit that I have no love for the company at all. But I use Microsoft software — at least some of it. Word is still the industry standard word processor. My editors would not be very happy if I told them no, I can’t view your manuscript edits, changes, or comments because I don’t use Word.
And Excel — well, I’ve been an Excel jockey (and a Lotus jockey before that) since 1990. It’s the only spreadsheet software I’m comfortable with. Everything else seems just plain wacky. (Think Numbers.)
What I don’t understand is how a company that’s so cash-rich and has such an enormous installed user base can’t give proper support for its two biggest products: Windows and Office. Could it have something to do with its management? Or have they simply adopted a “we’re too big to have to care” attitude because — well, they are?
What supports that last theory is that Microsoft never sends a follow-up e-mail asking me to complete a satisfaction survey. (Apple always does.) They obviously don’t want to know how satisfied I am. Why? Because they don’t give a damn.
So my laptop will remain Office-crippled until I get home to re-activate the software. Not much productivity when your primary productivity tool doesn’t work.
That’s book number 68.
I put the finishing touches on Microsoft Office Excel 2007: Visual QuickStart Guide. It’s my 68th book (I just counted) and right now, I feel as if I wrote them all yesterday.
Okay, so not that tired.
I had some trouble with this book. First, there was the beta software situation. Not only did I have to work with the Office 2007 beta, but I had to run it on the Vista beta. Double Microsoft Windows betas for a person who usually works on a Mac! You can imagine my concern.
But everything went pretty smoothly with that and I’ve been using release versions since January, so I know everything in the book is based on the final software.
Motivation slowed me down a bit in the middle of the project. I think I really need an editor cracking a whip over my head to get me to work at my old pace. These days, I’d rather fly than write about Excel. (Can you imagine?) The thing that snapped me out of it was money. If I don’t make milestones, my publisher does not send checks. Although Flying M Air is now paying all of its own bills — thank heaven; you should see some of those bills! — it’s not paying my bills. If I don’t write, I don’t eat. And since I like to eat, I became motivated.
Of course, the killer was my February hard disk crash and the two weeks it took me to get everything back to normal here. What a productivity killer! But it taught me a new valuable lesson about backups — you think I would have learned the last two times — and my old dual G5 is still running, now with a new hard disk to go with last year’s new motherboard. Sheesh. (Now you know why I bought AppleCare for my MacBook Pro.)
I churned through the last few chapters relatively quickly, anxious to meet deadlines tied to promotional opportunities. (I’m not sure of those promos really exist or if my editor has learned to tell me about fantasy promos to get me to work faster. I wouldn’t blame her if she made it up.) I had first pass files done last week and spent the past few days finalizing files based on edits. Today, after fooling around a bit — I’m the queen of procrastination — I laid out the index, created an ad for the book’s companion Web site, and turned it all in. The e-mail message I sent to my editor said:
I think I’m done. Can you ask them to send that final check? (Still waiting for the last one, too.)
The book weighs in at 360 pages, which is about the same as the last edition. It’s got the new VQS cover design. It lists for $21.99, but you can buy it from Amazon.com for $14.95 right now, which is 32% off. (Not a bad deal.) It should be in stores by April 20 or thereabouts.
Meanwhile, life goes on.
Tomorrow, I have to take my helicopter in to the avionics shop in Mesa to see if they can figure out why my radio isn’t working right. I have a meeting with a marketing guy down there at 10 AM. Then a tour of Phoenix for a man and his daughter at 2. Somewhere in between, I’ll have lunch with Mike, who has been away for the past few days. Then a flight home.
Friday I get started on my next book. Those of you who know me should know what that is.
After two months off from writing, I begin work on an Excel book revision.
I dove into a revision of my Creating Spreadsheets and Charts in Excel: Visual QuickProject Guide book today. I actually got the first chapter — all 16 pages of it — done.
If you’re not familiar with the VQJ (as Peachpit calls it) series, it’s pretty simple. Written for raw beginners, the books use a lot of full color illustrations, large text, numbered steps, and callout lines. Each book in the series is only 144 or 168 pages long — this one weighs in at 144 pages. It’s not the least bit intimidating for any reader.
The first edition of the book covered Excel 2003 for Windows and Excel 2004 for Mac OS. The two versions of Excel are virtually identical, so it made sense to do one book to cover them both. I think I did a good job giving each platform equal space and showing screenshots from both platforms when they were significantly different.
The idea behind the series is to present a project — in this case, creating a budget spreadsheet, duplicating it for multiple months of information, consolidating the months, formatting the spreadsheets so they look good, creating a chart, and printing. All the basics are covered in one project, presented over multiple chapters. The first chapter covers preliminary stuff like interface elements and terminology. The next chapter is where we start creating the spreadsheet.
I have two books in this series. This one is doing very well and has been translated into at least two languages. The other book — take a deep breath if you plan to read the title out loud — Creating Resumes, Letters, Business Cards, and Flyers in Word: Visual QuickProject Guide (I had to look it up; I can never remember the title of that book), isn’t doing quite as well. I like to think it’s because people don’t really want to create all those things. But it’s probably because the Word book market is full of titles and this 168-page tome just doesn’t stand out enough on bookstore shelves.
This Excel book revision is not cross platform. Tentatively titled Creating Spreadsheets and Charts in Microsoft Excel 2007: Visual QuickProject Guide, it covers Excel 2007 for Windows only. (It always amazes me when Amazon.com knows what one of my books will look like before I do.) To write it, I not only had to get my hands on the Office beta, but I also had to get the Windows Vista beta, which my editor wanted running on the computer for all the screenshots. Without Vista, he claimed, the book would look outdated right away. He’s right. And although I wasn’t too thrilled about running beta application software on beta System software, it seems to be working pretty well. Of course, I had to buy a new computer to run all this stuff. My ancient Dell desktop machine would have dropped dead if I tried installing Vista on it, especially with the new graphics-intensive interface. The new Dell Latitude 820 laptop I bought to replace it is handling everything with ease. It should for what it cost me. But with luck, I won’t have to replace it for 4 to 5 years.
Office 2007 is no secret. You can see screenshots and all kinds of training material on the Microsoft Office 2007 Preview site. You might even still be able to download a beta. It’ll run on Windows XP and Vista, so you don’t have to do a double beta like I did to run it.
Over the years, many have complained that Office doesn’t change much with each new version. You won’t hear those complaints this time around. Microsoft has completely reworked the interface. The menus and toolbars are gone, replaced with something called the Ribbon. Click a Ribbon tab to view groups of commands. Click a command to invoke it. Or click a tiny button in the corner of a group to display a good old dialog box.
The new design does appear to be easier for newbies to grasp. But I think it’ll frustrate the hell out of seasoned Office users — at least until they get used to the interface. There’s logic behind it, so if you think about what you want to do, you can figure out where to find the buttons or menus you need to do it. And all the old keyboard shortcuts still work, so if you’ve been using Office applications for years, you won’t be at a total loss in the new version.
Of course, all this has me wondering whether they’ll use the same interface in the Mac version of Office when it gets updated. That would be almost sacrilegious. After all, didn’t Apple invent the interface so widely used by Mac OS and Windows programs? I can’t imagine a Mac program without a menu bar that starts with File and Edit. I guess time will tell.
What’s good about all this for me is that people will need a book to learn the new versions of Office applications. They can’t just use an old Office book to work with the new version. With luck, that’ll help book sales a little. After all, I have to pay for that fancy new computer, don’t I?
Stay tuned for more information about this book as it is completed. It will definitely make it to stores at the same time as Office 2007 — heck, at the rate I’m going, I should be done with it by the end of the month.