Rant: MS Word "forms"

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

If you can't create a real MS Word form, at least use a table or something. What's absolutely worst is when people use underscores ("_") as blank space for you to enter.

It's absolutely idiotic for me to have to type my email address and then have to delete extra ____s. It's also just as bad when they just use an underlined space to mark the area where you type it in.

Thank goodness for people who create PDF forms. Saveable ones too.

 

[ElFenix]

non fillable PDFs are the debil

 

[spidey07]

If you can't create a real MS Word form, at least use a table or something. What's absolutely worst is when people use underscores ("_") as blank space for you to enter.

It's absolutely idiotic for me to have to type my email address and then have to delete extra ____s. It's also just as bad when they just use an underlined space to mark the area where you type it in.

Thank goodness for people who create PDF forms. Saveable ones too.

Forms like that are supposed to be hand filled, get appropriate signatures, then scan and fax/e-mail back. That's what the underscores are for. Most forms I use are filled out by hand, need the signatures and approvals by hand.

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

MS Word? WTF

 

[amdhunter]

OP is a ____________. Please fill in the blank, and print 10 copies thanks.

 

[jhansman]

OP is a ____________. Please fill in the blank, and print 10 copies thanks.

Can we get a drop down for that?

 

[Thump553]

Spidey may be right, but I can never figure out who is the bigger idiot-someone taking the time to create a computer generated form that requires me to fill out with my chickenscratch, or me for doing so.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Fillable PDF forms or bust!

If you don't know how to create one, please print and fax. It's safer.

Table formatting is worse if the person creating it doesn't know how to do it right, or if the person filling it out makes one wrong move and ruins everything. I am not fond of tables.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I hate people who make forms in anything but a web application. It's retarded to get an email with an attachment, have to fill out the form and tediously have to remove the _'s and stuff, then have to resend the filled out form by email. Why go through that trouble? Why not make a web form that sends an email to the receiver?

Where I worked I could not believe how complicated they made their forms, it was in Excell, and had this VB crap that would send emails out. WHY!?!?! Why not just have a page on the intranet and it can be written in php or something. So much easier. Guess who had to support that form when it did not work? We did. How do you fix something that has 20 copies spread out across the network in different folders? It was a retarded concept. At least with a web form, it's centralized and easier to use and support.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Fillable PDF forms or bust!

If you don't know how to create one, please print and fax. It's safer.

Table formatting is worse if the person creating it doesn't know how to do it right, or if the person filling it out makes one wrong move and ruins everything. I am not fond of tables.

InfoPath + Sharepoint >>>> PDF

 

[Lonyo]

(psst, try pressing "insert")

 

[spidey07]

I hate people who make forms in anything but a web application. It's retarded to get an email with an attachment, have to fill out the form and tediously have to remove the _'s and stuff, then have to resend the filled out form by email. Why go through that trouble? Why not make a web form that sends an email to the receiver?

Where I worked I could not believe how complicated they made their forms, it was in Excell, and had this VB crap that would send emails out. WHY!?!?! Why not just have a page on the intranet and it can be written in php or something. So much easier. Guess who had to support that form when it did not work? We did. How do you fix something that has 20 copies spread out across the network in different folders? It was a retarded concept. At least with a web form, it's centralized and easier to use and support.

Every company there is runs on Excel. They may have 10s of millions in web enabled enterprise and ERP systems, but what runs the business is Excel. All those fancy data warehouses, reporting and ERP systems are nothing more than a place for an excel spreadsheet to get it's data or to be copied and pasted into an excel spreadsheet.

 

[ShawnD1]

Where I worked I could not believe how complicated they made their forms, it was in Excell, and had this VB crap that would send emails out. WHY!?!?! Why not just have a page on the intranet and it can be written in php or something. So much easier.

Cost of making simple MS Word and Excel sheets: free since you weren't doing anything anyway and you already know how to use these

Cost of web application: $20,000,000,000 per hour. You wouldn't believe how much it costs to make software.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Every company there is runs on Excel. They may have 10s of millions in web enabled enterprise and ERP systems, but what runs the business is Excel. All those fancy data warehouses, reporting and ERP systems are nothing more than a place for an excel spreadsheet to get it's data or to be copied and pasted into an excel spreadsheet.

Excel is actually the #1 business intelligence tool and that's another reason why InfoPath and the Sharepoint platform (especially the BI stack) are so powerful, because they tie into Excel very nicely via SSRS, SSAS, etc. and let's not forget PerformancePoint and Powerpivot.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Cost of making simple MS Word and Excel sheets: free since you weren't doing anything anyway and you already know how to use these

Cost of web application: $20,000,000,000 per hour. You wouldn't believe how much it costs to make software.

This view ignores the power of the Sharepoint platform. With a little knowledge of InfoPath, you can make InfoPath forms which dump data directly to Sharepoint and can then be exported into a spreadsheet (or processed with workflows, etc). It drives me insane when I see coworkers sending around Word or Excel forms to be completed, knowing that more than likely, they're going to need to manually compile the data from those forms later. Sharepoint will do it for you with just a couple of clicks.

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

Cost of making simple MS Word and Excel sheets: free since you weren't doing anything anyway and you already know how to use these

Cost of web application: $20,000,000,000 per hour. You wouldn't believe how much it costs to make software.

The definition of an upgrade: Take old bugs out, put new ones in

 

[zanejohnson]

but then i'd have to change my shit!

 

[Red Squirrel]

Cost of making simple MS Word and Excel sheets: free since you weren't doing anything anyway and you already know how to use these

Cost of web application: $20,000,000,000 per hour. You wouldn't believe how much it costs to make software.

It is retarded actually, the thing is, they could ask us to make it, were already getting paid, it wont cost extra. But no, they have some kind of political BS reason why IT can't do any programming. It's stupid really, but seems most companies are like this. Instead we end up having to support this POS excel or word vB crap that was written by someone who cant code, and it's our fault when it does not work.

...So glad I got out of IT.

 

[shortylickens]

Word may have some issues, but PDF's are shit.

The biggest problem with Word is not everyone knows about some of the better features, like forms and tables and such. That can be easily corrected with training. But PDF is just a pain regardless of how talented you are.

 

[xSauronx]

InfoPath + Sharepoint >>>> PDF

came here to say this, however, lots of people dont know how to do that, or do not leverage sharepoint well

i work for an IT consulting company...we have some very smart people, but the office is run by non technical morans, so internally sharepoint is barely used.

want to know what my schedule is in? an excel spreadsheet.

 

[gorcorps]

I hate people who make forms in anything but a web application. It's retarded to get an email with an attachment, have to fill out the form and tediously have to remove the _'s and stuff, then have to resend the filled out form by email. Why go through that trouble? Why not make a web form that sends an email to the receiver?

Where I worked I could not believe how complicated they made their forms, it was in Excell, and had this VB crap that would send emails out. WHY!?!?! Why not just have a page on the intranet and it can be written in php or something. So much easier. Guess who had to support that form when it did not work? We did. How do you fix something that has 20 copies spread out across the network in different folders? It was a retarded concept. At least with a web form, it's centralized and easier to use and support.

That sounds like incredibly biased thinking based on either your job or history. Making a form to send out in excel is so easy I can teach the old people at work to do it. Designing a web form not so much. Unless there's a GUI attached to it there's no way these people will get it.

 

[IronWing]

Never use styles in Word. Never use styles in Word. Never use styles in Word. Oh, wait, Word 2010 automatically applies styles for you. Thanks Microsoft. Oh, and fonts and "style fonts" are different. If you select a style font instead of a plain font, it changes all occurrences of that font for you throughout your document, even though you never picked a style, Word did that for you too. Why is everything going to hell? You look like you're writing a financial report. Would you like Word go download the latest stock quotes?

 

[MovingTarget]

(psst, try pressing "insert")

Thats the easiest way to "hack" the computer of someone you dislike. Press it, and walk away all non-chalant-like. Hilarity ensues.

 

[Red Squirrel]

That sounds like incredibly biased thinking based on either your job or history. Making a form to send out in excel is so easy I can teach the old people at work to do it. Designing a web form not so much. Unless there's a GUI attached to it there's no way these people will get it.

It's easy until you have to troubleshoot why the code is not working, word coding is crappy to work with. The errors mean nothing and the code is all over the damn place in a non logical fashion. Word is not a programming tool, people should not use it for that. Then once you do manage to get the form to work, you have to make sure everyone's copy is the updated version. There's also lot of annoyances like warnings if it tries to send email. most users wont know what to do.

A web form can be whipped up in less than an hour, updated, and everyone with a web browser can easily access it. If a change has to be made, it can be done in minutes, and updated instantly.

I did a few at my old job. Basically the process manager just needed something done, I told her I could get it done by end of day if we do it with php, even though we're not really allowed. She told me to go for it. Within an hour I had something working. Meanwhile there was tickets opened for months about other word forms not working properly. Can be a pain to troubleshoot as there's so many factors that are specific to each user's PCs such as macro security, etc.

Web based form > everything. Companies need to stop outsourcing basic programming and let IT do some of it. Basic custom code can save millions of dollars and tons of time, if companies could just let IT do it. I'm talking about really basic forms here and stuff that is under 1k lines of code. Sure, the huge ERP stuff should probably stay with actual programmers who do it as their main function.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Thats the easiest way to "hack" the computer of someone you dislike. Press it, and walk away all non-chalant-like. Hilarity ensues.

LOL I don't know why I never thought of this. That could really cause some frustration lmao.