It's amazing we get anything done

You know MSOffice, right? I'm a contractor on a gov't project, and I have to use MSOffice to do my job. It's a contractual obligation. It has to be the latest version of MSOffice too, so I don't get to use a fully featured, time-tested and debugged version like 2003 or anything simple, it has to be Office 2007.

I'm sure there are plenty of blog posts in the world that go on and on about how terrible 2007 is for people that actually have to use it. I remember reading the gripes of Technical Communicators about the ribbon and the clicking years ago when it first came out. That's not my issue with Office 2007, I kind of like the ribbons.

My issue is that everything takes forever, SharePoint doesn't recognize the file types without a sledge hammer carefully aimed at the MIME on the webserver, and everything about it sucks just a little bit.

It's amazing that people in Project Management are able to get anything done at all. I spent a half-hour putzing around with a Visio diagram for a friend in IT today that should have taken five minutes to fix. I spent an hour going through a spreadsheet making the row heights all auto fit using a macro some genius created because Excel is programmed to not autofit merged cell heights (it's a FEATURE, not a BUG).

But do you know where they put macros in 2007 Excel? On the View ribbon, of course. Because Macros are all about viewing. I'll never understand why Office got rid of the Tools menu. Tools are good. But whatever.

I'm a technical writer (but I promise I won't have any blog posts that say [This post intentionally left blank.]), and if it weren't for the complexity of Office, I likely wouldn't have a job. 90% of what I do is exercising my experience hammering Office files into a clean and concise format. Being the Office Guru gives me a lot of job security, because it's the standard.

And honestly, it's the best tool available. I've used Open Office, it sucks. Their spreadsheet program is designed to do MATH for christ's sake. Don't they have any BA's on their team? Don't they know that Spreadsheets are the Word Processor of choice for every BA ever pumped out of a data center incubator? (Don't try to tell me BAs are humans born from a womb, I've worked with too many of them. They're obviously hatched.) You assign any BA a documentation deliverable, and you'll get an Excel file back, or if they DO give you a doc (or docx) file, it'll be all tables, almost as if they had possibly written it in Excel and then pasted it into Word. Probably a coincidence.

I saw Office 2010 is out in Beta now. Fabulous. I just can't wait until we have to buy that piece of software.