Saturday, May 31, 2008

Why I Hate Microsoft #459

I paste a set of data from excel into Access, and always get the following sequence of nanny controls that are totally annoying and useless:

The Value you entered isn't valid for this field (ie, there are #N/As)
-hit OK
Do you want to supress further error messages telling you why records can't be pasted?
-hit Yes
You are about to paste 4689 record(s)
-hit Yes
Records that Microsoft Office Access was unable to paste have been nstered into a new table called 'Paste Errors'
-hit OK

Because the middle two are yes/no, I can't just hit enter when I hear a beep. Who in their right mind would say OK, Yes, then, when told they are about to paste 4000 records say 'no'? Why not simply ask us 100 times if we are sure, because, you never know, and it's all about protecting the user from himself. I spend more time trying to disable Microsoft protection, than fighting unauthorized users or viruses.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Don't hate the program. Hate the programmer.

Behind every instance is a programmer, a person on consciously made a decision to develop software that is going to cause their users incredible stress. These aren't bugs or human errors the programmers made - those are excusable. They are misanthropic shortcuts or deliberations designed to make us mad.