Part 3: XLSX my tuchus

Someone in the office wants to save excel spreadsheets on a different drive. They right click the files in explorer and choose "save as" and then it only lets they save it as an Excel 2007 file, with an .xlsx extension name. Other people who try to open them with older versions are thus up a creek. But, when you choose save-as from explorer, you can't save it as a good, old .xls file. Why? Who knows. But for a company which spends millions of lines of code making their OS backwards compatible, this is horrid. I used it to make the point that when we next upgrade our computer systems we should have a real upgrade to a real operating system. I'm just glad I'm not using windows. Did you see the bit in the NYT about Microsoft execs inside emails about how Vista was not nearly ready for market?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/business/09digi.html

And this

http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0226/050.html

is a great pan of Vista. Which I hope to never have the pleasure to use.

my dad responds

I saw the Times article, well done. The Forbes article sounds like you
could have written it. Our product has to support Vista in our next
release. I cringe at having to support our support of Vista.

That change to file formats in Office 2007 (not just in Excel) is a
real pain. Most people here still haven't upgraded, and I wind up
having two copies of everything. MS was under pressure from the
European Community to move to open formats, but you can't convince me
that anyone is going to adopt their new ones just because they're in
XLS. OS X is so far ahead of Vista that it's like the lead Toyota has
in hybrids.