gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
Access - I will never get the "IT driving licence"
Which program do you hate using the most?
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JohnnyOrange
All The World...
Over the last few days I've been using Powerpoint for the first time in years.
I'm making up for my lack of presentation content by making it look like Top Of The Pops in the Eighties.
I hate it!
I'm making up for my lack of presentation content by making it look like Top Of The Pops in the Eighties.
I hate it!
gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
Powerpoint isn't bad. I've just noticed it has its own vector graphics tools in it.
Have you ever had to set up one of those web-based advertising screen controllers ?
Have you ever had to set up one of those web-based advertising screen controllers ?
gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
What is irritating is a Powerpoint plugin called "Pointcast" that is supposed to magically turn a multimedia powerpoint into a web-friendly Flash thingy ... I wasted 24 hours on a noddy thing recently
gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
Is it as bad when not connected to an Exchange server ?
ChrisFilter
Like a boss.
the button
out on the kocker
I fucking love Excel - it's brilliant
I'm a bit of an Excel fan too. Pivot tables. Oh yeah.
Although LOOKUP formulae are a bit of a pain in the arse. SPSS is where it's at, though. Although the one pain in the arse with SPSS 17 is that it's not clear what you do with missing values where the missing value is a blank. Surely it'd be easier to have a little tick box marked "Missing value is a blank" than just pressing your space bar in the missing values field and having no evidence that you'd done it until you produce loads of meaningless output. This is particularly the case if you have more than one person working on a dataset.
Anyway.
Orang Utan
Maybe I like the misery
IE and Outlook - they make me scream in frustaration and impatience.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
Adobe Acrobat Reader. First of all it means I've forgotten to change the default reader for PDFs, because under no circumstances would I ever want to use it deliberately. Secondly it means that I'm going to have to wait five minutes for it to load before I can even _quit_ it.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
Oh, and up until recently it's been Numbers on the Mac because it's had timesheets in it, but now, I've scripted it to automatically generate my invoices, print them as PDFs and make a new email to my client with the PDF as an attachment. So it's not nearly as unpleasant.
ajk
that's a shame
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
I fucking love Excel - it's brilliant
It's for people who can't use proper stats packages, or don't know any better. At least Numbers is pretty.
Orang Utan
Maybe I like the misery
So any Micosoft Office programme is hated almost universally by its users? 
Orang Utan
Maybe I like the misery
It's for rotas and compiling lists of media at my work - never been used for stats
8ball
As seen on TikTok
You can do way more with it than the sort of stuff you might use a stats package for, though. Even if you use the stats packages, it's handy for fiddling about with to get an idea of how a model would work.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
Actually, yes, it's also perfectly fine for typing up tabular data (though pretty much any word processor can do that too). If you wanted to do anything with those data you'd export it first though.
8ball
As seen on TikTok
I find the graphs ok. Much less of a faff to get a decent-looking graph than using SAS, for example.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
Windoze
the button
out on the kocker
One of the things that SPSS have done with newer versions is make the crosstabs function more like Excel -- i.e. you can pivot a crosstab in "output," rather than run a new query. I must say, I prefer it to the last version of SPSS I used.
Now, this could be because they're trying to reach into a non-academic market by making their product more like Excel, but do I find it far friendlier. Certainly friendlier than running another crosstab. Still a nightmare getting SPSS content into Word though, unless you export all your SPSS content first and then write your words around it (and who wants to do that, rather than a simple C&P?).
Now, this could be because they're trying to reach into a non-academic market by making their product more like Excel, but do I find it far friendlier. Certainly friendlier than running another crosstab. Still a nightmare getting SPSS content into Word though, unless you export all your SPSS content first and then write your words around it (and who wants to do that, rather than a simple C&P?).
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
Well that isn't saying much
Much less of a faff to get a decent-looking graph than trying to get a monkey to tattoo it on your arse based on a braille printout, too.Don't get me started on SAS; it's only because I entirely abandoned it after X years and now do entirely different things that it's not on the list for this thread.
8ball
As seen on TikTok
Ah.
What did you abandon SAS to do - I get the feeling I could save myself a few years here . . .
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
Anything. (At the moment, an assortment of bits of PHP and consultancy that I used to avoid work to learn about instead.)
To be fair it was more the jobs than the language, though SAS really is a shit excuse for a language. Without macros it's not even Turing-complete.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
I wish I could find someone who would pay me to do LISP again. That was fun.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
A university. Same with PROLOG. Real people don't use it.
8ball
As seen on TikTok
Well, yeah - it's pretty limiting without macros. And it departs from it's own logic a lot. And those internal loops can get a bit annoying. And that put/input syntax, and the money-grubbing license restrictions, and the fact that you can't just compile it to an exe . . .
My, it really is shit once you start listing things . .
Paulie Tandoori
shut it you egg!
anyone said Windows?
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
Really, do not get me started.
The only good thing about SAS is that knowing it, even to a "data foo; set bar; x = x + 1; run;" level means you can get pharma contract work for life. If that can be considered good.
The only good thing about SAS is that knowing it, even to a "data foo; set bar; x = x + 1; run;" level means you can get pharma contract work for life. If that can be considered good.
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