Hi Tony:
I was just "about" to add in my previous post that fixes take a bit longer
than that to work their way through the system
Having mis-spent the past 30 years of my life in and around software
development companies (with the exception of Microsoft...) I can tell you
that the effort Microsoft puts into evaluating, quantifying, and tracking
customer feedback is really impressive (compared to what I know goes on
among their competitors). If you want some practice at being ignored, try
to get Adobe or Apple to fix an issue some day
People make jokes about feedback disappearing into a "black hole" or "the
bit bucket" at Microsoft. I can tell you that it simply doesn't happen!
For the past five or ten years, they have been steadily improving their
comprehensive system that acts like fly-paper to stick to absolutely every
customer report they get (and that's maybe 100 million a year...).
Regrettably, as you can imagine, any system that "big" is never going to win
a lot of awards for being "quick".
At the risk of repeating myself (because I've put this information in here
before...) the way software development works in a large company making
shrink-wrap software (Apple, Adobe, Microsoft etc) is roughly this...
* The products are released in two cycles: "Feature Releases" and
"Stability Releases". A Feature Release comes out every odd-numbered
release, the Stability Releases are the even-numbered ones. This rule is
not cast in stone, BTW, none of them are, but it generally holds good. And
of course the companies will never tell you which is which. My guess (and
that's all it is -- a guess...) is that Office 2004 was a "feature" release.
Which leads me to expect fewer goodies and fewer bugs in Office 2006 or
whatever they call it.
* A major company always has three versions in play: "n", n+1, and n+2.
"n" is the one on the shop shelves. "n + 1" is the one that is currently in
development. "n + 2" is the one currently in design. A large product such
as Office may have service releases in the mix too.
* The versions are roughly two years apart. How long an "issue" takes to
get fixed depends on how bad it is, what percentage of users it hits, and
how much work is involved to fix it. A trivial thing such as a wrong
language ID may be fixed in a service release, so it could potentially be
fixed in six months. Bullets and Numbering is a huge design and coding job
which is not likely to be done until the move to a 64-bit code base.
You should also not equate the fact that they have logged a bug as
indicating any intention, let alone ability, or plan; to fix it. There are
a very large number of "issues" logged against Microsoft Office on the PC
and Mac, and some of them have been "logged" for ten years
Nobody (not
even the developers working on the product) can tell for certain what is
going to be fixed and what isn't until they get to the "Zero Bug Benchmark",
which is a milestone very late in the development project (about three
months from the Release to Manufacturing deadline) when they stop accepting
new bugs against the current version.
I am guessing that the Spanish Dictionary problem is a trivial issue and may
be resolved in the next service pack, but please don't hold me to that.
I also believe that your bug would have been logged the moment you reported
it. I would not normally become aware of that fact, because I cannot see
the content Microsoft Bug Database. In this case, I became aware of it
because of a conversation I had with someone on the Microsoft staff who told
me he or she had seen the issue in the bug database. I don't know when it
was inserted
Hope this was interesting
John,
Thanks very much for this great information! You made my day!
At the same time, it is amazing to me that I have been reporting this
issue at the Microsoft forums, at Mactopia web feedback page and also
directly from my email client to Microsoft many times since May 2004
and so far the issue had not been fixed.
I know Microsoft must be quite busy, but I humbly suggest that paying a
little more attention to customers would be better for both Microsoft
sales and customer satisfaction.
It is really frustrating to report a bug dozens of times over almost a
year and not seen it fixed when new updates come out... Not even
registered on the Microsoft knowledge base of issues, FAQs, etc.
Having said that, I want to repeat my gratitude for your support. I am
really happy to hear that the bug will be finally squashed.
Best regards,
---
Hi Tony:
Sorry, I was a bit slow there. You're right, there is a bug in the Spanish
spelling mechanism.
Word will accept a custom dictionary in any other language EXCEPT Spanish!
You will find that you can
I can't promise you they will fix this soon, but I can say that they have
now logged it as a bug.
Sorry about not picking up on this immediately -- my bad.
On 20/3/05 03:46, in article 2005031917464775249%nospam@nospamcom, "Tony"
John,
Thanks.
I have already done so.
As previously explained, I cannot set my custom dictionaries to "none"
language because:
"we must keep different custom dictionaries for each language that we
use. We cannot mix languages in the custom dictionary. Thus, we need to
create an English custom dictionary and also a Spanish custom
dictionary."
"We cannot mix custom dictionaries because there are words that are
correct in one language and not correct on other language. If you mix
dictionaries you would not correct such mistakes. A particular and very
same word is correct or not depending on the language considered. I am
surprised that people are using "none" as language for their custom
dictionary to mixing all their custom dictionaries. That is dangerous
because many typos will not be detected! For us this is a very
important issue indeed."
Additionally, changing the language of the dictionaries causes Word to
crash and the custom dictionary content is wiped out. All that is
explained with full detail in my previous posts.
And amazingly this problem arises with the Spanish custom dictionary
only. No problem with other custom dictionaries like English, French or
German.
No problem with any custom dictionary prior to Word 2004.
And I have been reporting this to Microsoft from May 2004. Almost a
year later nothing has been fixed.
Microsoft: please, please, please, fix this serious Word 2004 bug. It
is frustrating.
Thanks.
---
On 2005-03-19 13:01:14 +0100, "John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word
Macintosh]" <
[email protected]> said:
Hi Tony:
Check back in this thread -- starting on Feb 2nd. As explained in our
several answers on the subject, there are several things you have to check,
beginning with the "language". Your Custom Dictionary should be set to "No
Language".
Cheers
On 13/3/05 21:52, in article
(e-mail address removed), "Tony"
Any help on how to fix this issue most appreciated:
I'm using Office 2004 for Mac and cannot activate the custom dictionary
and
automatic spelling features in Word. When I attempt this I receive an
error
saying the custom dictionary is unavailable. -- Pedro Maldonado
Thanks.
