Anatomy Of A Bug In Microsoft Office

bender writes "An insightful look at what it is like to track down and fix a bug in Microsoft Office is available from Microsoft's Blog site."

Comments

Just a thought

[penguinrenegade]

Too bad more time isn't spent on removing bugs from Microsoft products. Now if they'd just spend time fixing BEFORE products are released!

another fix for ms office

[joeldg]

or fixes:
http://www.gentoo.org/
http://www.vim.org /
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html
h ttp://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

Re:Why was that flagged "troll"?

[Frizzle Fry]

They claimed that 2000 server had an uptime of 99.99999%. (5 nines, that was one of their slogans.)

Great, but the percentage you gave is actually seven nines. Five is two less than that. Good try though.

Re:Oh, your Ferrari has a broken cupholder?

[justsomebody]

Actualy, not right. In some cases M$Office is Yugo and in some OO.o is Yugo.

I was using M$Office for a long time. And I must admit it was a real pain in the A$$. My requirements are either long (about 70-150 pages) technological papres or simple Invoice like features (up to 4 pages).

Problem 1: (long documents) is that whenever you choose different printer whole document gets screwed.

Problem 2: (invoice like) the only way you can incorporate RT calculated table is with OLE. Which limits you to one page.

btw. I was never fond off Excel like except when I needed on-screen calculations, but for printing sucks major (just as OO.o Calc and others in this kind of software).

Let's say that I agree that M$Office is Ferrari, but that just limits you to the road. Sometimes off-road veichle would be far better. And in case of going trough the woods (terrain, not road), you wouldn't come far with your Ferrari, while even plain sucky Yugo would probably come to the finish line

What a bunch of fscking morons

[jeffasselin]

No, really. They found out the reason for that bug ONLY LAST YEAR?

That's simply incredible. Unbelievable. I found out the cause of that bug BACK IN 1999.

I'm not joking. We had a lot of customers complaining of this bug in Word 6.0 and Office 98. My usual recommandation? "Upgrade to Mac OS 9, it will make it (mostly) go away."

That's because one of the significant improvements Mac OS 9 offered over previous versions was how Apple had increased the number of total open files in the system. See this article.

At the time, we surmised that the "disk full" error was probably not really a "disk full" error, and was probably caused by something else. Our initial uses and reports from OS 9 showed that this issue almost never occured in the new system, and since one of the major changes was to increase the number of open files, we easily guessed this was the cause of the error. This change was also shown to solve a number of issues in other software and situations.

Can someone explain to me why they only found solved the issue in 2003???