Comments on: Comedy support

By: Harlan Grove

Harlan Grove — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:34:47 +0000

You want comedy? About 14 years ago the company I was working for at the time paid for me to travel from California to New Jersey to diagnose a problem east coast users were having with a model I was maintaining at the time. Turned out that IT had upgraded east coast offices to Lotus 123 Release 5 before the rest of the country. I was still using Release 4.

So what was the problem? The model read text files into particular ranges in the workbook. Release 4 treated formfeed characters in the text files as just another oddball character, displaying ♀ when it came across one. Release 5 OTOH would create new worksheets whenever it came across formfeed characters, so each printout page would be in a separate worksheet. Since the workbook was protected, the macro died before importing the needed information, which was after the first formfeed character.

So roughly US$1,500 travel expenses and 2 days of my time just because IT for whatever reason upgraded software on a piecemeal basis and didn’t think of testing the newer 123 version against any existing spreadsheet models.

Gotta love maintenance!

By: JP

JP — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:54:05 +0000

Sounds like the “simple” problem Bob was having:

http://msmvps.com/blogs/xldynamic/archive/2010/06/09/thicker-than-a-length-of-4be2.aspx

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:41:05 +0000

No. But I’ve just worked on a project where the user insisted on keeping every sheet permanently in Page Break Preview mode. Odd, and incredibly distracting, but that’s the way they worked. I’ve a feeling that somewhere a bit further up the food chain was a manager who insisted on seeing everything only on paper, and company culture had subsequently elevated ‘looking good when printed out’ to a fetish.
And I had to write some extensions to my normal Sheet_BeforeRightClick routines in order for them to work correctly. Which was OK – they feel a lot more robust now.