I thought we could be friends.
No, more than friends. I thought we could be great together.
Me? I don't like Office, but I have to use it. I keep looking at the things you almost get right in your prior incarnation - Saved Searches in Outlook 2003, especially - and think "Oooh. That could be so much better."
Then, along comes Office 2007 and with it, a nifty new feature called "Instant Search".
With integrated Instant Search, you can locate all the information you're looking for right from within the Office Outlook 2007 interface. Not only can you search by keyword through your information, but Office Outlook 2007 Instant Search also looks for those keywords within your e-mail attachments. For more directed search results, the Instant Search pane provides helpful criteria to narrow your entry.
See, building a search folder and caching its contents is great. But, every time I want to build a new search folder, I have to wait...
...and wait...
...and wait while Outlook searches all the mail I have stored to present me with the result set I'm looking for.
Instant Search? Bah! It'll use Windows Desktop Search to constantly search and index the contents of your Outlook folders and, when it comes time to search for messages, BAM!
There they are. Instantly.
...
Sounds like a match made in productivity heaven.
Then, I tried installing it. And then, I tried making it work.
See, when Microsoft says "integrated", what they mean is, "If you want to actually use this 'integrated' feature, you have to install this other piece of beta software that's so much in beta that it doesn't even have a UI yet. How's that for beta?"
OLE Registration errors. Uninstalling. Reinstalling. Reverting to previous versions. Hacking out Registry keys. Installing again. Updating, installing, removing.
Very, very quickly, potential happiness turns to scorn. Scorn turns to hatred. Hatred turns to spite, which then turns into dogged determination.
But, at every corner you're there, Outlook 2007, waiting to laugh at me and my troubleshooting skills.
"You've gotten soft, old man. Give it up," you taunt.
"F*$% you, Outlook," I mutter underneath my breath.
And so it's gone now, for nearly two months. A lost weekend of troubleshooting, fighting with Windows and Office, hoping that this time won't be the time that Office 2003 decides to fail when I have to reinstall it before Monday morning.
At some point, I'll just have to suck it up, reformat and reinstall. Gigabytes of music, dozens of applications and settings, documents galore. All will have to be rebuilt.
"Nuke [it] from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Thanks, Ripley. I'll keep that in mind.
Honestly, the only good that's come of this is a deep and abiding love for the Mac, and the total lack of these types of problems on the Mac.
Don't worry, Office 2007. I hate you, too.
Posted by mithy at August 27, 2006 06:03 PM