the worst piece of software

[ian]

This deserves a topic of its own. I've briefly had to convert things to Powerpoint before, but I've never really had to use it

It truly is the most atrocious piece of software ever, everything it does is counterintuitive, menus and ribbons shift and are perpetually focused on the features you don't want (and good luck finding that feature, because it won't be where you think, or be hidden only to appear if you happen to click on some random object), if you breathe near your mouse you'll find yourself editing the wrong slide and screaming in frustration. Editing an embedded chart, lol, you fuckers.

Let's not get into basic features like font support and resolution independence which you might think would be key to a presentation tool intended to produce presentations for display on various devices.

Everything about it makes me think WTAF. I'd do it in Keynote, but I'm 'collaborating' and let's not even get into the fact that it's via Onedrive/Sharepoint.

[rusky]

TBF, you can attribute that post to every microshaft product!

[FifeingEejit]

I've used much much worse software than anything from MS Office.

Just try using Googles tools for a start.
I rate it less user friendly than anything *nix.

[Kim]

I grew up designing for 35mm slide projector with Harvard Graphics 3 for DOS.  Every version of PowerPoint I've had the misfortune to use since has been a retrograde step.

Gnuplot, while the confirming to the worst stereotypes of *nix software in terms of usability, has the significant advantage of actually being able to draw graphs properly, which is something MSOffice seems to go to inordinate lengths to avoid.

If you're presenting something other than graphs (perhaps interspersed with the odd photograph or title side), you're probably a Thought Leader or Marketroid or similar, and nobody cares about your presentation anyway.


My award for worst piece of software I've ever used goes to PDP++, which makes PowerPoint seem like a fun day out.

Honourable mention to LibreOffice or whatever it's called this month for attempting to imitate the worst of MSOffice and failing.  It does the job, if the job is sufficiently trivial.  If it's not, you probably didn't want to be using MSOffice anyway and are being forced to by Word or Excel being an industry standard.

[Polar Bear]

I nominate the social media apps such as facefook, twatter, bitchslapp, instasham, etc. which make it nigh on impossible for unwitting victims to untangle themselves from their insidious tentacles.

And from these apps the fat fingers of orang-u-tangs and their cabals poison our society ...

[Kim]

I nominate the social media apps such as facefook, twatter, bitchslapp, instasham, etc. which make it nigh on impossible for unwitting victims to untangle themselves from their insidious tentacles.

Those are extremely well designed (indeed, they carefully titrate the level of advertising and algorithmically promoted bollocks to just below the threshold of what people will tolerate).  They provide a dopamine hit in exchange for data and manipulation, and work so well that literally billions of people use them willingly.

Competence doesn't make up for evil, thobut, so I think we may have a winner.

[Mr Larrington]

The only reason I ever fire up Photoshop is because its Magic Wand selection tool is a good deal better than the one in paint.net.  Well, that and the fact that it’s overkill for my usage patterns.

[Beardy]

MS Project is shocking, with idiosyncrasies too numerous to mention. Then there is that abomination that is Sharepoint. Word, Excel and PowerPoint are all ok if you only use the basic functionality. If you try and enter the realms of the power user it soon becomes apparent that the extensions have been bought in from third parties and have been grafted superficially onto the side. Then there’s sharing, integrating or embedding either within the suite or with third party programmes, that’s when you really start to understand that they were all created by different groups of people who were bought out by MS but never fully integrated into a common architecture.

Other than that, anything created in oracle business. Truly the most unintuitive, unfriendly and down right evil thing ever to come out of the minds of a tech head.

[Jurek]

I've never managed to figure out why, when you do a copy & paste in Outlook Express, it changes the font and the format.
Is this some sort of advantage that I've never really appreciated?

[Jaded]

If you have used Keynote (which is not as good as it used to be) then PowerPoint is indeed terrible.

I also nominate Access. Shittier than a pencil that has been used to work it out...

[Mr Larrington]

Twenty years ago I managed to persuade Access to do an inventory databasey-thing without too much difficulty* but I'm blowed if I can get it to do what I want now.

* Except for copping flak from Git Boss for not doing it in Excel

[FifeingEejit]

MS Project is shocking, with idiosyncrasies too numerous to mention. Then there is that abomination that is Sharepoint. Word, Excel and PowerPoint are all ok if you only use the basic functionality. If you try and enter the realms of the power user it soon becomes apparent that the extensions have been bought in from third parties and have been grafted superficially onto the side. Then there’s sharing, integrating or embedding either within the suite or with third party programmes, that’s when you really start to understand that they were all created by different groups of people who were bought out by MS but never fully integrated into a common architecture.

Other than that, anything created in oracle business. Truly the most unintuitive, unfriendly and down right evil thing ever to come out of the minds of a tech head.

MS Office does the basics well enough; Google shite does not.
Now you mention Oracle
Oh now you mention Oracle

Oracle RDBMS routinely demonstrates that it was "first";
what with it not having developed anything close to a modern security model until 2019 and even then schema = user (seriously wtaf)
and having a separation between it's SQL and Procedural language that means it's an utter ballache if you want to do a series of set operations to get your end result.
I routinely mumble "I don't get paid enough to be working with this shit" which is true according to the market rates, but I'd hate to go DB only.

The boss and higher management did actually listen to my answer to "if you had the choice of RDBMS what would you go for" (it was SQL Server, for... reasons...);


Access is fine for basic DBs, I've got my DVD catalog in it.
I mean there's stuff it can't do or at least which I couldn't be arsed figuring out how to do but for knocking up a DVD catalog it's absolutely fine; on a par with it's former NoSQL* brethern "Cardfile"

* NoSQL is a ridiculous term just call the other types of database what they fucking are you bunch of reprobates, document, graph, kvs etc. you know the bit that actually important, because tgeres no fucking way something that genuinely belongs in a document database makes any fucking sense in a KVS or Graph Db is there.

And if it's acceptable then GIT is NOSVN, CI/CD is NoScheduledReleasePlan and Communism is NoBoss.

[Lightning Phil]

Google maps app gets an honourable mention for not giving you the total distance of a route if you have intermediate stops.  Plus sending walking routes down trunk roads and dual carriageways with no footpath. Plus street view links don’t work if you tell them to fuck off tracking your map searches or refusing location services.

[Feanor]

Outlook Express

<Checks decade>
Wot???

[quixoticgeek]

I found reveal.js to be a much more enjoyable solution for creating presentations. And it flows nicely to fit round different resolutions etc...

J

[Lightning Phil]

Norton antivirus was a crock of shit.

[Lightning Phil]

Windows mail in Windows 10 doesn’t support TLS. What!

[Polar Bear]

Norton antivirus was a crock of shit.

Gosh, yes.  Huge "protection" packages that simply slow your machine down to a crawl.

[Jurek]

Outlook Express

<Checks decade>
Wot???

It is what my employer gives me to work with.
As well as an OSX which is around 5 years out of date 
I'm more up to date at home than I am at work.

[Kim]

Norton antivirus was a crock of shit.

Gosh, yes.  Huge "protection" packages that simply slow your machine down to a crawl.

There's a Rule According To Kim that all security packages eventually turn into Norton.

This is what happens when security becomes a marketable product, rather than something that quietly happens in the background.  Customers want perceived value for money, so the product becomes noisier, bloatier and generally more irritating in order to justify the expense.

[Mr Larrington]

Norton antivirus was a crock of shit.

Gosh, yes.  Huge "protection" packages that simply slow your machine down to a crawl.

There's a Rule According To Kim that all security packages eventually turn into Norton.

And as a corollary, are a bloody sight harder to remove than the malware they're supposed to be policing.

[rogerzilla]

Acrobat Reader.  What a crock.  Bloatware that needs patching every 5 minutes to avoid opening a back door into your computer, an annoying sidebar, a non-intuitive interface and it crashes literally half the time I open a PDF.

[Mr Larrington]

This Unit endorses Sumatra for reading PDFs, after Foxit started to get middle-age spread.

[Beardy]

Norton antivirus was a crock of shit.

Gosh, yes.  Huge "protection" packages that simply slow your machine down to a crawl.

There's a Rule According To Kim that all security packages eventually turn into Norton.

This is what happens when security becomes a marketable product, rather than something that quietly happens in the background.  Customers want perceived value for money, so the product becomes noisier, bloatier and generally more irritating in order to justify the expense.

Which reminds me, I need to do something a bit more proactive on the virus protection front because OSX is no longer an obscure OS and I don’t remain in the walled garden for software on the desktop.

[ian]

Acrobat Reader.  What a crock.  Bloatware that needs patching every 5 minutes to avoid opening a back door into your computer, an annoying sidebar, a non-intuitive interface and it crashes literally half the time I open a PDF.

Full-fat Acrobat is no better than the Reader, which even given Adobe's predilections for UX crimes, is a special case, though these days you don't really need to use it other than for masochism.

I've never bothered with antivirus on a Mac and never will. Just don't download dodgy stuff and you're probably OK.