Microsoft Office 2007 Incompatibility Pain

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I'm going demented at work. I am the only person with any IT experience and everyone pesters me with their computer problems. At the moment I am constantly being moaned at because people are being emailled attachments created in Word 2007 (docx files) which they can't open in earlier versions of Word. I would like to shoot whoever it was in Microsoft who decided on this new file format. Of course the plan is for them to make more money because people think they need newer versions. I am sick of having to tell people to save their files as a 97-2000 document. Argh!! !! !

Reallly, I just wanted a rant. Anyone else feel the same way.

I can relate to your pain. I'm a professional software developer and part of my work involves writing code that runs various office programs (Word, Excel) as components. It is a real pain writing and maintaining code that is compatible across multiple versions of Office and multiple Windows operating systems.

My main customer likes the software that I write for him to generate its output reports in Excel and Word - this enables the end users to subsequently edit and annotate the reports.

The biggest problem is down to poor Microsoft documentation. They give lots of code snippets on this and that but no overall picture on how the pieces should be used together. Sometimes they give example walk-throughs but not often. Many of their code samples miss out one or two critical lines of code, parameters or settings that can lead to hours of internet searches and trial and error coding.

There have been times I've not been able to use the latest Visual Studio 2008 methodology at all due to poor documentation and I've ended up coding to use (obsolete) API calls to ancient dll's just to get the job done. A fairly recent example was a simple need to record sound via a microphone. Not the most complex programming task you would imagine. However, the latest MS technology is unusable for the simple reason its documentation is so bad. I've ended up using API calls to the old MAPI dll - at least it works.

It is a regular occurrence to end up Googling for how to use various poorly documented Microsoft technologies - and finding countless other developers hitting exactly the same problems. Coding becomes guesswork, try this, try that, does this work. Instead of clean properly designed code you end up wasting many hours putting together a raggle taggle heap of code that "sort of works" most of the time.

/End rant/

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats may help.

Maybe they don't want anybody programming useful programs the can cut into sales of Microsoft products.

Today's Microsoft gripe:

An application I'm working on at the moment handles a lot of data when it starts up and consequently it takes a few seconds to load. So I added one of Microsoft's ready made splash screen. Great. Works on Vista. On XP the damn splash screen stays open after the program has loaded. Quick Google search reveals it is a known bug (since 2008 !) and Microsoft haven't got around to fixing it yet. Result - waste a couple of hours trying various work arounds none of which were satisfactory. Ended up ripping out the Microsoft Splash Screen class and writing my own from scratch. At least it works! Damn Microsoft and their buggy badly documented code.