BITPlan

⚠️ LLM-generated content notice: Parts of this page may have been created or edited with the assistance of a large language model (LLM). The prompts that have been used might be on the page itself, the discussion page or in straight forward cases the prompt was just "Write a mediawiki page on X" with X being the page name. While the content has been reviewed it might still not be accurate or error-free. ✍️🤖 Agent/Seth: Did you know that Microsoft does not listen?

This page is part of the Does not listen series. Pain is measured on the IT Pain Scale from 0 (no pain) to 10 (showstopper).

363,489 people asked. Closed in five days.

Every Python developer who opens a project in Visual Studio Code hits the same wall: the imports of the project's own modules do not resolve. So they search. Since 2018 the question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53653083/how-to-correctly-set-pythonpath-for-visual-studio-code has been viewed 363,489 times and voted up 162 times.

So we asked Microsoft to do it automatically for default project setups:

Pain: 3 tolerable — you get used to configuring it by hand in every project. 363,489 times.

Language is not one thing

Operating system language, user interface language, document language, keyboard and country are all independent. A German company writes English slides on a German keyboard for a conference in Spain.

The rule Microsoft uses

In plain words: whoever uses the computer speaks one language, and that language fits everything.

In scientific hieroglyphs: 

∀u ( lang_OS(u) = lang_UI(u) = lang_document(u) = lang_keyboard(u) = lang_country(u) )

Every multilingual user falsifies it. Microsoft bought Presenter from Forethought in 1987 and sold it as PowerPoint. 39 years later you still can not switch the language of all slides at once. The uservoice suggestion asking for it now answers 410 Gone; only the archive copy shows how many people asked.

The same rule hits Excel: the formula language follows the user interface language. Want English formulas? Switch all of Office to English — https://superuser.com/questions/984789/change-language-of-command-in-excel asked since 2015.

Pain: 4 distressing — you notice it in every multilingual document.

Sorry, your work is lost. Report the bug? Why?

PowerPoint 2016 crashes. It knows it crashed. It even apologises that part of your work may be lost.

Options to report the bug and get it fixed: none. There is a repair option that might or might not work. Losing work to bugs becomes part of your daily routine — plan for it. What would Microsoft be worth if it had to pay for all the work lost this way?

Pain: 6 intense — lost work, no channel to get the cause fixed.

It used to work

Export notes pages to PDF and the hyperlinks are gone — on the slides and in the notes. It worked in Office 2010. It is broken since 2013.

Pain: 4 distressing — every handout with links has to be fixed by hand.

Slide 2 of 12

PowerPoint numbers your slides. Showing the total? Microsoft's own support page says it can not — you have to do that manually. Every time you add or remove a slide.

Sounds small? We are a training company with hundreds of presentations. Working around this took us months of effort — and there is still no proper solution.

Pain: 6 intense — months of workaround effort for a feature every trainer expects, still unsolved after 39 years.

BITPlan listens

At BITPlan we spend time with listening. Because we can: we are not a billion dollar company with lots of hierarchy levels. You can talk to the owner just like that.