Sunday, March 23, 2008

Department of Retarded Software Companies

My laptop doesn't have Word on it, so I wrote two reviews in Microsoft Works this afternoon (while at the in-laws for Easter festivities) and then e-mailed them to my home computer.

Microsoft Word here is utterly befuddled by them, and has no "Microsoft Works" option to open them with. This is a simpler file format, from the same company, for a program with exactly the same functionality. What idiot forgot to make them compatible with each other?

2 comments:

Graeme said...

The option to read a Works file is apparently not installed by default. See Convert Works documents to Word format for instructions on how to turn it on. The instructions will be different for different versions of Office, but only slightly -- I just checked my installation of Office 2003.

Microsoft has a pretty good record in supporting file compatibility, forwards, backwards and sideways, in my opinion. Once I'd installed the free tool, I had no problems reading Office 2007 files within Office 2003, for example.

Andrew Wheeler said...

Graeme: I think you have a higher tolerance for idiocy than I do -- if Microsoft wants Word to be the killer-ap word processor, it has to open files in any and all formats -- so neglecting to support a simpler format from the same company strikes me as either really dumb or really lazy.

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