Comment Re:Word had more features (Score 1) 346
When I have a problem with Office, I do a Google search and I find people who have left the answers. Microsoft's web site, much as I hate to admit it, is an excellent manual in every version of Office. They paid a lot of very good technical writers what they were worth to explain it. (In fairness, they haven't been up to the same quality lately.)
I generally agree with most of your post right up to this part . . . Unless it's a very trivial problem, and I'm too lazy to RTFM (which I happily admit MS has done quite a nice of supplying online), most of the "solutions" I see contributed to the MS "support" site (answers/social.whatever.microsofft.com) are worthless dribble -- ranging from the overly simplistic ("Read this generic troubleshooting guide" -- yay more points for the responder!) to anecdotal rubbish ("I was eating a jelly donut when I rebooted my computer and now it works, so go get a jelly donut and reboot" -- yay! more points for the responder!) to completely unfeasable ("Disable all your macros", reply "But the whole point of using Word is because the application NEEDS those macros", followup: "But your document will open then" - yay! more points for the responder!)
My most memorable example: About 2 years ago, I was chasing down a problem with Excel 2010 on an HP laptop running Win 7. The exact details escape me at the moment, but basically what was happening was Excel would get into a state where it unable to select certain worksheets (like clicking on a certain worksheet tab and a different one opening as though the user had misclicked). I can't count how many suggestions I got to replace the mouse, install new drivers, upgrade system bios and even reinstall Windows! (all marked as "solutions" - yay! more points for the responders!). Never mind the fact that the mouse worked flawlessly in every other application and had all the latest drivers. Every suggestion worthless but was obviously the "solution" according to the responder and their little fan clubs. Turns out HP's "Wireless Assistant" utility (a utility of dubious merit to begin with) had a bug that was causing it to specifically conflict with Excel 2010 (and a patch for it from HP)