Microsoft and My Life

For the past week I have been up to my eye balls trying to get Word 2007 to work. Here is the problem.

It seems as if there is a fatal flaw. I of course complained to Microsoft. No result.

Here is the problem.

1. If you create an Index in your document, say a book, which I am in process of having eight nearing completion at the same time, you may have these fields which contain and xml XE statement.

2. If perchance you nest one of these, such as Justice, Social, and Social Justice, and then re-index, well, when you try to open the document again, sorry you get the message of death.

Unspecified error

Location: /part/document.xml, Line: 2, Column: 259439

That is truly informative. That is all you get. Apparently Microsoft knows this and they let it continue in 2010 as well. There is no patch, no warning, just instant death! Goodbye document. You may be able to fix it if you know xml well, but that was another two days!

3. As I have measured lost hours of my life in Mega Gates, a Mega Gate is a measure of lost humanity, it represents one femto second per Microsoft user, give the millions of users and the millions of problems it adds up quickly. It makes filling out your IRS forms look like a cake walk!

4. Some suggestions are available from non Microsoft sites. But the solution is simple.

5. Always save your Word in docx, doc, htm, html, and even xml. Do not ever close a docx file with an index unless you save all types.

6. Another approach which I am trying is eliminating all indices in documents. Then hopefully you will not experience the problem.

So if you wondered what I have been doing, fifteen hours a day converting and fixing files! Not just me, but thousands of others, millions of productive hours down the drain ... why if Microsoft keeps this up we can eliminate all unemployment by having people perpetually fixing their product problems.

This may be the most important fact that I have ever communicated, especially if you write at the level I do! Days, days, lost, never to be gotten back! And my office used to be in the Gates Tower, thank God it moved! Have they no shame! Where are the class action lawyers!