h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Something that is truly useless in the style of items found in HHGTTG...

That little animated figure that's supposed to be "help" in Microsoft Word and Excel. I've never seen a more annoying feature in any other software in all my time. The annoyance is compounded by the fact that the figure (be it a talking paperclip, or an Einstein cartoon, or whatever) tends to move and fidget every so often, drawing the eye's attention away from the task at hand. And when you try to close it, there's a horrid 3-second delay before it goes away, as if trying to ascertain if you're actually foolish enough to spurn its oh-so-useful help and advice.

Whoever came up with that idea should be throttled with his own used-up toilet paper.

Wampus

Micro$oft publicly apologised earlier this year for the "Office Assistant", and then promptly released Office XP. However, they have yet to apologise for the fact that only Win2k and WinXPbeta users can use their new office package without haveing to spend a small fortune on upgrades.

Can't have everything I suppose.

I hate the way the Office Assistant taps on the screen when you're working on a spreadsheet.

You think its going to suggest a quicker way of achieving a result but what it suggests is generally more relevant to frying kippers!

The first thing I do when I open an MS package is switch the annoying little B off and use the "text" help, which is time consuming if you can't work out the right question to ask it but less irritating than Mr Paperclip!

... And I can't think of a bigger waste of time than the "Animate!" feature.

It starts innocently enough... you have writer's block and/or you are bored, so you right click on mr. evil paperclip to see what else he can do besides just look smugly at your workspace. Then you find yourself trying all of the different office assistants to make sure that you aren't missing any of the wonderful little sequences thought up by Mr. Gates' evil henchmen animators. Then, before you know it, forty two minutes have gone by and you are still stuck on your opening sentence. Ooooooh, thou art a cruel mistress, MS Word!!!

Even ignoring the demon paperclip(BTW I once made it melt) most help files bundeled with Computer Software are thouroghly useless. Try pressing F1 now and finding somthing useful if you don't believe me.

It looks as though you are writing a letter. Would you like some help?
Aaaaaaaghh! NO!

There was a sheet of MS related funnies doing the rounds in my office a while ago, including the paper clip popping up to say 'Hello! It looks like you're writing a suicide note! Would you like any help?' So the damn thing has made me laugh before now.

Also read a Jakob Nielsen article a couple of days ago, which came up with a use for paper clip that I'd thought of myself - to detect the words 'please find attached' in an email and pop up saying 'It looks like you meant to attach a document to this email - would you like to?' It'd still be irritating and smug, but it could eliminate all those 'oops, here it is *with* the attachment' mails.

Now that one would be useful. Now we just need a computer that reminds you to take the cd-rom out of the computer, before you head over to a friend with an empty case.

Fundemental to the awfulness of MS Words's help is the way it trys to complete words for you that you have aboslutly no intention of using. and they are usually wrong too.

There should be another option to the MsWord help things, self destruct or it should at least come supplied with a hammer so when it pops up sayin "it looks like your typing a letter" u can straighten the damn things and use it to hook the remanents of resterdays lunch from th keyboard.

Not only is there a delay for the Sodding Paper clip but we have a virus checker that really make the computer grind.

In the old days
I started working for a big telephone company 10 years ago and could get on with my work a lot faster with.

486 sx
4 meg ram
40meg hard drive
Dos 5 /6 I Still use it for BAT files and some file manipulation.
Win 3.11 Stable and fast to reboot, if it went wrong I could fix it in the same day
Wordstar 5 We could fit all the projects files on 1 floppy disk.
Supercalc All I want to do is work with a few numbers.
Harvard Graphics Simple easy to use and no grief.
VT100 access to the database Less choice, only one way to skin the cat.

Today the same type of works takes much longer, is it more choice ? or what ? that slows us done (maybe I am getting old)


Ok Word ver 2.0 was very good but could not do Wordstar graphics boxes ... flow diagrams, couldn't even convert them.

"winge winge .. moan complain"

cu

And precisely what version of the English language are the questions written in? When I ask it a question, I write it normally & use all the right words, but it still doesn't understand. Eventually I just take to writing obscenities in the box to see if it understands them, but no joy yet.