back to article 'Microsoft Office has been the bane of my life, while simultaneously keeping me employed'

Welcome back to Line Break, our weekly roundup of terrible code you've seen in the wild. Over the past six weeks, we've featured all sorts of broken or ugly source – from insecure web apps to write-once-read-never-again scientific programs. Now we turn to ... the monthly report. The sort of thing you automate ASAP with a handy …

  1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    MS Orifice - so aptly named

    I shall be glad when I dinnaly call it a day and retire. No more MS Office and no more 'ribbon'. Ugh! Personally, I hate the evil thing. It slow me down so much.

    Then there are the projects that have their whole lifecycle in a single Excel spreadsheet. all the issues, hitsroy and fixed in on effing/sodding great spreadsheet. God how I hate this practice. Almost as bad as ***** powerpoint presentations.

    roll on an Office free world.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: MS Orifice - so aptly named

      Entire test suites kept in a spreadsheet, with Excel trying to guess that your test data is actually a number and stripping out the leading 0, or not allowing your data to begin with a dash or an equals.

      1. Adam 1

        Re: MS Orifice - so aptly named

        Produced a flat CSV file to push some data into a third party system. User has Excel and proceeds to double click the file. Excel helpfully and silently truncates any leading zeros. User closes and is prompted to save changes, of course answering yes. Now file won't import (best case) or imports wrong data (which is really hard to recover from in this case). Total PITA.

        1. Trixr

          Re: MS Orifice - so aptly named

          MS has the powershell Output-CSV cmdlet output all fields with the data surrounded by quotes*. I had to look it up, but the use of quotes in this way to force interpretation as strings is in fact *legitimate* for CSV.

          * Amusing they have to build in the workaround to their own stupid product.

          1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

            @Trixr Re: MS Orifice - so aptly named

            I think you're missing the point. The problem isn't Excel exporting CSVs, it's when Excel imports a CSV. That's when it "helpfully" removes leading zeros, re-formats dates, etc.

  2. Bc1609

    The deep mysteries of VBA bugs

    I spend a fair bit of time in VBA and I share that poor writer's pain. The most recently encountered bug was one that, apparently randomly, reset the options in Find and Replace in Word. It had a very low chance of occurring - maybe one in every twenty thousand uses or so - but it's there. And if you're not guarding against it, it will screw you over. There are tons of these.

    1. Lysenko

      Re: The deep mysteries of VBA bugs

      That "wait" issue is as old as Windows itself. If you're doing hard loop processing, mess with a UI context directly (like switching sheets) but fail to Yield/SleepEx or otherwise defer to the message queue to process the WM_PAINT etc. then bad things can happen.

      With a proper language you can use worker threads and sync objects. With VBA I imagine best practice is to behave like you're programming for Win16 (or something equally primitive, like JS async callbacks).

      1. Alien8n

        Re: The deep mysteries of VBA bugs

        I'm fortunate that I have no coworker to come after me for that fudge, in the event that I ever leave the report will revert back to someone physically having to copy and paste data manually.

        It's also a fudge that works but has no discernible detrimental effect on the remaining code.

        Ironically MS Office on a Mac does have one huge advantage that the Windows version doesn't have. You can work on other applications at the same time the macro is running. Which is great if the macro is still running at lunch time as it means it'll continue running in the background even while you're reading El Reg.

      2. James 47

        Re: The deep mysteries of VBA bugs

        How are async callbacks primitive???

        1. Lysenko

          How are async callbacks primitive???

          Have a look at the WSA... socket functions in the Win16/32 API and you'll see what I mean. The concept was dreamed up to support "cooperative multitasking" (translation: "we can't do multi-threading properly") so that blocking operations could be fudged by posting WM_ messages to the primary message queue to trigger "events".

          It avoids synchronization objects (Critical Sections, Mutexes) at the cost of implementing state machines and (usually) global variables all over the place. Modern versions of Windows support something similar via the WaitForMultipleObjects() API, but that is mostly for avoiding busy I/O waits in worker threads. Using it to bundle blocking I/O into the primary UI thread is almost always an anti-pattern.

          JS, like Win16 (and VBA), is inherently single threaded so has to implement the same workarounds MSFT did 25 years ago.

          1. James 47

            Re: How are async callbacks primitive???

            Async callbacks are used even for multi-threaded code, unless you use the anti-pattern of using one thread per request (whatever a request is in yuor domain), which will kill any chance of implementing a scalable architecture.

            1. Lysenko

              Async callbacks are used even for multi-threaded code..

              Yes. That's I/O completion ports and WaitForMultipleObjects() etc. since we're talking Windows. I was discussing the approach in the context of single threaded scripting languages (JS, VBA) and/or operating systems (Win16).

              As for anti-pattern: I agree if one defines "scalable" to mean "web scale", but there are other games in town. If you have an industrial control system communicating with 8 gizmos it may be that the only scaling physically possible within the factory is 32 gizmos and persistent state with deterministic timing is everything (Robotics, for example).

              In such cases one thread per peer is perfectly valid and eliminates some timing and race condition traps that an async/state machine/thread pool approach needs to code around with sync objects. Global locks to transfer a state object between threads are expensive, for example.

      3. Mark 65

        Re: The deep mysteries of VBA bugs

        That "wait" issue is as old as Windows itself. If you're doing hard loop processing, mess with a UI context directly (like switching sheets) but fail to Yield/SleepEx or otherwise defer to the message queue to process the WM_PAINT etc. then bad things can happen.

        Does DoEvents not handle it?

        1. Lysenko

          Does DoEvents not handle it?

          I believe so (I don't do BASIC). As I understand it DoEvents amounts to the same as Application.ProcessMessages in FreePascal which in turn amounts to something like:

          procedure DoEvents()

          var

          msg : TMsg;

          retval : Integer;

          begin

          while (PeekMessage(msg, NULL, 0, 0, PM_NOREMOVE )) do

          begin

          retval = GetMessage(msg, NULL, 0, 0); //Message Pump

          case retval of

          -1 : raise EFatalException.Create;

          0 : PostQuitMessage(msg.wParam);

          else begin

          TranslateMessage(msg);

          DispatchMessage(msg);

          end;

          end;

          end

    2. Sgt_Oddball

      Re: The deep mysteries of VBA bugs

      This is why at my last place of work i feigned ignorance on anything vba related.

      I also knew that the original developer of most of it for Excel 2000.... Was pushing up the daisy's so no chance of finding out just why it did certain things. (also meant that office 2k was still in use in 2014..*sigh*)

      1. Tom 13
        Devil

        Re: the original developer of most of it for Excel 2000

        I'm surprised he upgraded to 2000. Everything past 97 was crap, and 97 is all you need.

        1. oiseau
          Happy

          Re: the original developer of most of it for Excel 2000

          > Everything past 97 was crap, and 97 is all you need.

          Indeed ...

          Your comment has made me very happy.

          Been triyng to get that in many co-workers' heads for the longest while.

          Cheers.

          1. Knewbie
            Devil

            Excel 97 bugs...

            I have one with my name on it (as the guy that reported it...^^)

            Intern, had to migrate a bunch (1500+) excel files (and their macros...) to consolidate on another excel.

            I decided to do take the easy way and learned my two bits of VBA, and basically mass cut and past every single cell concerned. Work once, test twice, fiddle with Netscape on the job while the macro is running... good plan.

            Alas, cut and paste do not appreciate to have a ";" in a cell.

            As in copies the first part, then stops and pastes everything before the ";"

            Cue MS Tech support : "yes, it is a bug. will be solved in the next version" ARRRGH

            Solution : one macro to replace ";" as "ß" | launch original macro | replace all "ß" by ";"

            lazyness, full internet acces, and the first time I ever said "sorry, macros are running, I cannot do what you need' aka:compile time ^^

        2. DJV Silver badge
          Unhappy

          Re: the original developer of most of it for Excel 2000

          Regretfully, if someone sends you a spreadsheet with more than 256 columns then opening it in Office 97 (and possibly 2000, if I recall correctly) will just silently truncate each line at 256 columns leaving you none the wiser that there was ever any more data available.

          I gave up on Office after 2000 and now use WPS or Libre as they are both less hassle.

          1. jonathanb Silver badge

            Re: the original developer of most of it for Excel 2000

            Anything up to 2003 has a maximum of 256 columns and 65536 rows.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: the original developer of most of it for Excel 2000

          97 was the last version to run on NT 3.5.1

          So NT 3.5.1 is all the OS you'll ever need.

          1. Alan Brown Silver badge

            Re: the original developer of most of it for Excel 2000

            "NT 3.5.1 is all the OS you'll ever need."

            Bearing in mind that everything past that point has been progressively less stable... "Amen"

  3. pakman

    That's bound to hurt!

    "sobbing with your hands in your head"

    That image that is going to stay with me for a while.....

  4. Novex

    Difficult to describe this one

    I have used VBA in Orifice over many years (though less so these days). My biggest problem was with automation between Access and other programs, particularly Excel.

    If I had been asked to program a formatted and detailed output to Excel (with things like charts and stuff), often the 'easiest' way was to get Access to create an Excel instance in the background, create a workbook and output to that, without having to show the user anything.

    Now, often such outputs to Excel would take a few minutes, and the user would go off and do something else while they were waiting, like check other Excel files.

    So, cue problem: as far as I could ever figure out, Microsoft never made it possible to prevent the background Excel application from being visible to Windows Explorer. This meant that whenever a user used Explorer to find an Excel file to open and double-clicked it, instead of Windows opening a new instance of Excel, it would always seek an already running one, which would make the background Excel visible and all of the automation occurring from Access into the output file, often mucking up the process as well. Grrrrr.

    These days I really try to avoid such things, and I'm trying to get into proper programming, like C++. It's safer than VBA.

    1. Richard 81

      Re: Difficult to describe this one

      There's plenty of middle ground between scripting in VBA and close-to-the-metal C++, you know. If you have to produce Excel worksheets for people, there are some nice Apache Commons Java libraries.

      1. Novex

        Re: Difficult to describe this one

        There's plenty of middle ground between scripting in VBA and close-to-the-metal C++, you know. If you have to produce Excel worksheets for people, there are some nice Apache Commons Java libraries.

        I'm not learning C++ to do anything in Office with it, it's for server side programming. Producing Excel worksheets via automation is now a thing of the past for me (I hope!)

    2. Alien8n

      Re: Difficult to describe this one

      At one company I worked at their entire print and control system was written in Access and ran on a timer overnight to print thousands of letters each night. The macros built into the Access database would open a form, show or hide images embedded into the form (creating client's company logos for the letters) and then a bespoke printer driver would select the printer for the letter to be printed on.

      Along with that there was a reporting database (again Access) which would also run overnight producing the reports. The VBA code for that one would open a Excel spreadsheet, write the results of an SQL query to it and then send it via Outlook to a list of people.

      Invariably something would go wrong every day.

    3. Major N

      Re: Difficult to describe this one

      I've always found the biggest issue to be the amount of people who use select / activate far too much. You don't need to select sheets, ranges etc to perform actions on them. Just be specific.

      i.e.

      Sheet.Select

      Range.Select

      Selection.Copy

      Sheet.Select

      Sheet.Range.Select

      Selection.Paste

      Anything that interrupts that flow of selection (especially during debug) ruins your report.

      If you're concise and explicit, that problem goes away.

      Sheets(name).Range(Range).Copy

      Sheets(otherSheet).Range(range).PasteSpecial xlPasteValues

      The other one is where you open secondary workbooks. Noone ever seems to instance them into a variable, and as such rely on the filename as a handle, and when saving out date-specific versions to different places, that becomes a major issue just tracking the last name you saved it as.

      I used to manage an estate of 90 reports, all run through excel vba, which were triggered through the Win2K task manager (I know, I know.. but it worked, mostly). By making the code concise and explicit, I could have 10 reports running simultaneously on the same machine, without fearing they'd screw each other up.

      VBA is not evil in and of itself (the differences between versions, and even the versions used in different Office applications of the same vintage not withstanding...). Bad VBA is, however, and it is endemic, as most coders of it seem to learn only through recording macros and regurgitating what it records.

      1. Stevie

        4 Major N

        I havn't automated a Microsoft Excel sheet for years (2000 was the last version I worked on at this level) but I immediately thought what you said about activating and selecting when I read the account.

        Your comment about "only so much VBA and no further" attitudes is spot on. There is a double standard inculcated in Western CS graduates that if they didn't get indoctrinated in it in college it dowsn'tbwork, and therefore it is the language's shortcomings to blame rather than a lack of proper know-how on the part of the programmer.

        While I wouldn't use VBA to script anything these days it is because I don't write macro code for office and have script tools better suited to the tasks I do want to do than any "brokenness" in the language per se.

        And of course, automation that self-launches in any but the most controlled environments is horribly dangerous in any computer language with late binding.

      2. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: Difficult to describe this one

        Also, when dealing with large amounts of data, I copy it into arrays in memory to work on it - it's an awful lot quicker than operating directly in the sheets.

      3. Neil Charles

        Re: Difficult to describe this one

        I've stopped using VBA in favour of R and Python, but do remember seeing a lot of this. In correcting one common mistake, you've made another one.

        "Select" and "Active" in macros are bad, but so is copy and paste. What happens if the user manually copies something while your macro is running?

        Sheets(otherSheet).Range(range).formula = Sheets(name).Range(Range).value

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The worst think about office

    It's when you have to fix someone else's access database, I've lost count of the number of hours trawling through uncommented code that references queries named after pet dogs and other databases hidden on the network that no one knew about, all with zero documentation except "Put data here and press button". Don't even get me started on a button to VBA to a macro script to run a few VBA procedures with helpful names like proc_22, Proc_2 in no particular order and all the common sense attributed to attempting to herd cats. The problem in the end was two tables unhelpfully named as suplis supcod not having a new supplier entered which really should have been in the documentation.

    1. Alien8n

      Re: The worst think about office

      It's even worse when you also get a call to SQL procedures and have to then trace that through a labyrinth of SQL views and tables. Remembering not to refresh certain views as for some reason someone coded triggers on every single table and updating one single field in one record creates a cascade effect...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        THING, THING goddammit

        .(some letters)

  6. Just Another Script Monkey

    You got me at the title...

    I've always said that, for better or worse, if it wasn't for Microsoft, I would be busking on the streets... and I can't play any instruments.

    1. phuzz Silver badge
      Go

      Re: You got me at the title...

      I was going to say you could drop the word 'Office' from the title and it would still work, but then I realised you could put almost any program or OS in there.

      Perhaps "Computers have been the bane of my life, while simultaneously keeping me employed" would be the most accurate title.

  7. HmmmYes

    Fucking VBA.

    Fucking Office.

    Cant some kickstart an pyhton automated Lubre Office bundle - Uno and all that?

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Why bother?

      Just use xlwings (works also on MacOS). Though for this particular task I'd be tempted to do it all in Python, with my-developer-of-a-Python-Excel-library hat on, as the overhead of communicating with Excel severely limits any parallelism.

      1. thames

        I was also thinking that I would use use Python with an off the shelf library to suck the data out of the master file, figure out the report, and then generate the report files. That's assuming that MS Excel is even needed anywhere in the process at all and you can't simply go from database to final presentation format. I wouldn't be surprised if doing the report in Python (or some other similar language) cut the run time down to being limited only by how fast the PC could write the output files to disk (i.e., seconds).

        Many years ago I re-wrote a report system for a critical product quality system from a database + proprietary language (which will remain nameless to protect the guilty) to using a "proper" programming language with in-memory data. I had inherited this system and had previously put much optimisation work into cutting the daily report run time from "all night long" to "a few hours".

        Upon testing the all new "proper" system with real data, the report was on the screen before I finished raising my finger from the "enter" key. I spent much time with a debugger before convincing myself that it was working correctly and it really was that fast. That made a big impression on me which has lasted to this day.

        The thing which makes me most nervous about VBA + MS Excel reports though is just how hard it is to understand what's in there and what it's doing. Nobody but the original author seems to understand it. Code auditing, unit tests, revision history (who changed what and why), etc. are usually non-existent. And yet you can find many companies whose bean counters quibble for hours over the provenance of every expense receipt, but are perfectly happy to plug those numbers into a rat's nest of VBA macros and an untraceable chain of spreadsheets to come up with the company's bottom line. It's a horror show that I'm happy to stay well away from.

        1. Alan Brown Silver badge

          "bean counters quibble for hours over the provenance of every expense receipt, but are perfectly happy to plug those numbers into a rat's nest of VBA macros"

          If you want to blow their minds, ask them if they understand what those VBA macros do and if they've been properly audited.

          It's about then that they go from thinking "computer says no" to "this was written by someone, somewhere who wasn't an accountant and doesn't understand double entry bookkeeping, or WORSE, was an accountant and whose coding skills are on par with mine"

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      LibreOffice is scriptable from ruby and perl IIRC, I mainly use the ruby binding to extract data from .XLS files rather than to produced finished outputs..

  8. Valerion

    Load bearing breakpoint

    Came across one today very similar to the VBA one above.

    When stepping through the code it worked, when run normally it didn't. Took me a while to track down that it was reading a DB value that was updated in one scope that hadn't quite updated fully, and due to the read uncommitted isolation level, I was still picking up the old value.

    1. Uncle Slacky Silver badge

      Re: Load bearing breakpoint

      I'm told that (an earlier version of) a Fortran program I once supported would run fine in debug mode but give wrong results once compiled normally. This was eventually traced to 16-bit values being assigned to 8-bit long variables (or 32 to 16, can't remember), which, thanks to the generosity of the debug mode, happened to always be located at 16 (or 32) bit intervals in memory, which enabled the overflow to be stored "accidentally".

      The (minimal) optimization of the compiler of course removed this margin...

      1. Paul Kinsler

        Re: Fortran program, [ran] fine in debug, but wrong results once compiled normally.

        IME of fortran, most (almost all) weird heisenbugs were due to out-of-bound array references or data size mismatches. Except for the one that turned out to be due to tiny differences in numerical integration, combined with (crossing or not) the branch cut in the complex square root function.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bernie Madoff had two programmers that wrote reports that gave as output what Bernie wanted, rather than what was based on the input. They are both in jail.

    When the first Senior Manager gets jailed for instructing what should be the output, IT will dramatically improve in quality.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "When the first Senior Manager gets jailed for instructing what should be the output, IT will dramatically improve in quality."

      I am more worried by the possibility that senior management had actually been making decisions based on the garbage data point, and that replacing it with anything with rand() in it would suddenly cause major changes in company policy. For better or worse, that's the question.

      I once worked for a company which made some products in very low volume (like <1 a month.) As they were rather expensive, the MD asked if there was a way of using statistical analysis to forecast production volumes. Based on six months of history. I quite liked the old boy, but the ensuing conversation reminded me forcibly of rules I had formulated years before:

      Rule 1: Do not discuss statistics with mechanical engineers.

      Rule 2: See Rule 1.

  10. Tom 7

    The purpose of reports is not what you think it is.

    I often spent my time examining office 'documents' in the vain hope of being able to apply sensible software practices to the flotsam and jetsam oozing out of offices.

    I once worked out what a massive report that took a couple of days to run on the company accountants top of the range PC which sucked data from the mainframe db until his PC was overflowing with data he simply analysed in excel and knocked up a bit of code and some sql and got it down to about 5 minutes run time.

    I then found out there was a very good non-operational reason why this report had to take two days to run. I've had lots of different jobs since then but almost all of them involve people who dont like very simple procedures being run by anyone other than themselves for reasons that their boss wouldnt like - unless they are in on it too as is sometimes the case. I do wonder if this is why Office is so popular when there are far better cheaper solutions.

    1. Alien8n

      Re: The purpose of reports is not what you think it is.

      My first Excel report. Ran on a 486 laptop and took 20 minutes to run. The manager resisted all attempts to shift the report onto one of the (then) brand new pentium machines. Reason being, once the report was kicked off it gave him just enough time to sneak a full english breakfast with the production shift in the canteen. I eventually moved the report onto the new PC, but continued with the traditional breakfast break on the grounds I got to chat with the production staff and hear what issues they were having in an informal setting prior to the main engineering meeting (that the report was being run for).

      1. Commswonk

        Re: The purpose of reports is not what you think it is.

        ..."once the report was kicked off it gave him just enough time to sneak a full english breakfast with the production shift in the canteen. I eventually moved the report onto the new PC, but continued with the traditional breakfast break on the grounds I got to chat with the production staff and hear what issues they were having in an informal setting prior to the main engineering meeting

        Good heavens; Manager meets staff for discussions in informal setting

        In my experience the value of that sort of approach is almost beyond measure; different levels - perhaps different disciplines / departments - chat in relaxed setting. The outcomes are almost inevitably beneficial.

  11. Tom 13

    Re: I can imagine a coworker coming for someone's kneecaps

    This would be one of those times when a comment in front of the code would be appropriate.

    REM: No idea WTF this fixes the crashing as it is effectively a null function, but it does. Feel free to spend a week hunting the root cause if you have the time.

    1. David 132 Silver badge

      Re: I can imagine a coworker coming for someone's kneecaps

      No idea WTF this fixes the crashing as it is effectively a null function, but it does. Feel free to spend a week hunting the root cause if you have the time.

      Reminds me of the "magic switch" anecdote - if you're not familiar with it, it's a good read, like so much of the old computer lore!

      http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I can imagine a coworker coming for someone's kneecaps

        "Reminds me of the "magic switch" anecdote - if you're not familiar with it, it's a good read, like so much of the old computer lore!"

        And I can totally believe it. I'm sure the explanation is the true one as a lot of SELV-level switches in those days were liable to short to the toggle and the case. It's a pity nobody checked after removal, though.

        In the days before just about all serious production electronics had multilayer circuit boards, stray capacitance was a constant problem. I once encountered an issue with an industrial computer which had a peripheral which kept returning no data. We spent a couple of weeks trying to identify the software problem and eventually hired a very expensive, very fast storage scope. With which we discovered that a pulse on an adjacent but unrelated circuit board was causing a signal of about 1.5V for 20ns on a line on the peripheral that reset the output register. If this occurred between the register latching a value and being read, it cleared the register.

        The solution was to replace the signal trace with the reset line with a piece of miniature coax. Later on I came across other boards where people had broken tracks and then run bits of wire wrap wire straight from one IC pin to another. While removing yourselves from my lawn, consider how much fun it was when solving apparent software problems sometimes required a LeCroy scope and a soldering iron.

        1. Paul Cooper

          Re: I can imagine a coworker coming for someone's kneecaps

          AMEN!!!

          Many years ago, I worked as the software half of a two person team developing a prototype one-off data logger for a low-frequency radar. The number of "discussions" we had along the lines of "The software's fine - it must be the hardware" "No, the hardware's fine, it must be the software" probably went into 3 figures! And at least one problem never went away - we upgraded to a 9-track tape drive, and we could never get that to run completely reliably - once in a while, it crashed the system for no apparent reason. The previous cassette tape system worked fine, but was almost impossible to extract data from after a field season!

          1. frank ly

            Re: 1.5V 20ns transient - I can imagine a coworker...

            That sounds like it needed a 'wrangle capacitor' to ground. About 50pF usually did the trick; either that or press your fingertip over the wire/track.

        2. Roo
          Windows

          Re: I can imagine a coworker coming for someone's kneecaps

          "While removing yourselves from my lawn, consider how much fun it was when solving apparent software problems sometimes required a LeCroy scope and a soldering iron."

          I genuinely enjoyed debugging with the help of a 'scope and/or logic analyser. Happy days. :)

  12. Annihilator
    Terminator

    Self-modifying shell scripts

    "“How far ahead do sh and csh read their script files so I can have them edit themselves safely while they are running?”"

    I'm pretty sure that's how Skynet got started...

    1. Bumpy Cat

      Re: Self-modifying shell scripts

      If that's what runs Skynet, humanity may have a chance ...

  13. Keith Oborn

    As in Excel, so in C

    Many years ago I worked at a Well Known Daily Newspaper (begins with "I")

    A colleague was writing a pre-processor for text input to the prepress page makeup system, all based on good ol' SunOs. Naturally, he was using C, as any good Unix coder back then would do, if he wanted something fast.

    He put printfs in liberally to help initial debugging, the took them out one by one. All was well until he took the last one out, whereupon his code died each time.

    He put it back in: worked fine. After day of poking around, this was assigned to a "mysterious compiler timing problem" (code for "no idea"). He then proceeded to work out the minimum number of characters it had to printf in order to work.

    8

    The ops team were very surprised when, the first time this was used in production, the console window printed:

    fuck it

    f u c k <space> i t <cr> = 8 characters.

  14. Neil Charles

    I spent today...

    ... Teaching a bunch of analysts how to use R.

    I'm an analyst and I used to use VBA a lot. No more, it's awful and it needs to die. The sooner the better.

    1. Pompous Git Silver badge

      Re: I spent today...

      Teaching a bunch of analysts how to use R

      I can hear the sighs of relief all the way down here in the Land of Under: "Aaaaaaah..."

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Progress feeble

    Last time I looked at Excel 2016 for Mac the VBA was enormously behind the version for Excel 2011: you couldn't even add userforms. Microsoft could be excused the lag in 2011 as Apple had dumped Carbon and moved to Intel processors so MS had lots of work just to keep up. Excel 2016 for Windows seems fine: it's where they have put their resources.

  16. Agent_99

    Good software, bad reality

    I worked with a Fortran program that stored telemetry data from a satellite download. The satellite was designed to last 32,000 orbits, and the software worked fine. But the satellite kept working, and exceeded its design lifetime. On orbit 32,768 the software program failed. The problem was that the Fortran software used 16-bit integer variable data-types, which satisfied the satellite lifetime design objective, but the actual satellite was over-engineered and refused to die on schedule. The managers decided to blame the software instead of the satellite. That caused expensive fixes to a lot of networked software around the world.

  17. Stoneshop
    Boffin

    Self-modifying shell script

    I've worked with one of those, kindof, but it had a not entirely insane approach.

    Due to the peculiarities of the command languages (yes, plural) involved, the initial script queried the user for some variables that had to be used in the second script, despite the language this second script was in not having any concept that even vaguely approached variables. So the first script wrote the second script with the required data in the appropriate places, using a fair amount of copying and appending boilerplate interspersed with lines built around the values contained in the variables. Once that part was done it connected to the target system, read the freshly-created script and fed it into the target system's command interpreter.

    Most of it was actually pretty straightforward; only strings that the target system required being quoted ended up with (I think) five levels of escapes at the point where the first script was writing the second script.

  18. Pompous Git Silver badge

    I first realised MS were fsked when...

    ...I attended a MS Tech Briefing on SharePoint Services. After the main presentation, the MVP showed us what we were to look forward to in the next version of Office: The Ribbon. The application was Excel and the MVP explained we would be much happier with The Ribbon and not have to use menus. So I asked "how do I split a window if I cant't select Window, Split window from a menu?". After farting around for several minutes and becoming very red in the face the MVP said we probably didn't need to split windows any more so it was a feature that had been dropped. I can't for the life of me recall if he said it was "for your convenience", but there you go. I'm an old fart who couldn't imagine using a spreadsheet where I couldn't split the window.

    1. mm0zct

      Re: I first realised MS were fsked when...

      IIRC you just grab a little "handle" next to the scroll bar and drag it onto the page, it automatically splits the page like you're peeling back some sort of partition. I think you can even keep doing this for more splits.

      It's embarrassing that the MVP didn't know this, and I also hate the ribbon interface, but the feature wasn't dropped.

      1. Pompous Git Silver badge
        Pint

        Re: I first realised MS were fsked when...

        It's embarrassing that the MVP didn't know this, and I also hate the ribbon interface, but the feature wasn't dropped.

        I was eventually shown this, but it was long after the horse had bolted. I didn't use any ribbonised Office applications until I discovered KUTools Classic Menus that gives you your menus back. Why MS didn't give the option of turning menus on or off is a bit of a mystery. Let's face it, Alt F, S is almost as fast as Ctrl S (for an example) and certainly faster than selecting the correct ribbon and button with the mouse.

        I felt sorry for the MVP as he could hardly be expected to be fully familiar with an early beta and likely hated the Ribbon as much as I do.

        Have a beer and an upvote.

  19. a_yank_lurker

    Office Users

    My experience with most office users, including the macro lovers, is they have very little knowledge about computers. On occasion I get to "debug" that in some Excel spreadsheet the date format is wrong when it is loaded from a csv file. Excel has its own ideas about these formats. After running the first of these down, I told my boss I will not write a macro to "fix" the problem since this would get users in the habit of running macros in Excel. My boss agreed and we have solution, just tell the complainer it is an MS failure that we can not fix. It seems to work.

  20. Hans 1

    I inherited an excel workbook that has a macro to read XML data from a database ... it has to run in Excel 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016, on the various supported client Windows versions.

    You cannot simply use "new MSXML2.SAXXMLReader40", because in newer Office versions, you need version 5 or even 6 ... depending on Windows/Office combination and which version of the DLL is available ...

    Any time you changed this, it would fail on one of the target platforms, since this is for customers, you cannot reliably tell which combination they have. Note that Excel plain out crashes on some platforms when you attempt to load the incorrect version, so error handling is futile.

    The solution was to use CreateObject with Object variable (late binding) instead of instantiating the object with "new" keyword, iirc, you could then use error handling reliably on all tested platform combinations ... Note that I did not test all possible combinations.

  21. Duffaboy
    FAIL

    The Ribbon

    Why ?

    Should have been an optional setting

  22. Duffaboy
    Mushroom

    Normal.dot

    I had a fault once where menus were missing not all just some

    It transpired that Normall.dot was corrupted

    1. Pompous Git Silver badge

      Re: Normal.dot

      It transpired that Normall.dot was corrupted

      Hopefully attributed to a corrupt hdd or RAM and not MS Word. Despite Word's manifest faults, this is not something that I ever came across despite creating (and creation of) many thousands of Word documents over the last 25 years.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Normal.dot

        @Pompous Git

        You were lucky, it was a well know fault with versions of MS Word (going back over 15 years at least).

        Normal.dot would get corrupted and it would 'change' how MS word worked.

        It could be caused by other add-ins overwriting Normal.dot at the wrong time or 'Naughty' Programs (Viruses etc) or crashing your PC/losing Power or just random luck (based on the assurance that none of the previous had occurred :) )

        I supported many thousands of MS Office Users across many different companies and it would happen on average 2 or 3 times a month.

  23. Duffaboy
    FAIL

    Excel

    Spreadsheets are for numbers folks they are not for

    Embedding images

    Links to network shares that only you have access to or your local drive

    Excel is not a colouring book

    Excel is not an alternative for CAD

    Excel is not an alternative to word I.e if you have meeting minutes then use the correct app

    If your going to print your spreadsheet then most printers use A4

    1. Pompous Git Silver badge

      Re: Excel

      If your going to print your spreadsheet then most printers use A4

      Unless you happen to be in the US. Odd thing here in Oz is the very high percentage of computers where Windows has been installed with Region Setting = USA, thus MSO uses American Letter for paper size and doesn't use the excellent Macquarie English Dictionary for spell checking.

  24. bill 27

    It's like deja vu all over again.

    Back in the stone ages, that'd be the 70's, I had a process that ran on a XXXXXX computer. The process would start, remove a old file, create a new one and take off. Blew up. Finally figured out that if I put a sleep between deleting and creating it would work. Seems that the multi-processor/multi-tasking was screwed.

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