Friday, November 21, 2014

OneDrive and Excel Online data loss

I think that around the time that I noticed that OneDrive's Excel Online finally got the ability to sum cells by mouse-selecting a range of cells, rather than manually specifying the range, that is when there were some hiccups at Microsoft and a day's worth of changes were lost.  Looking in the revision history of the file (File > Info > Previous Versions), there was not even a trace of any changes made on Nov 19, 2014.  So far this data loss appears to have only affected Excel Online and not OneNote, which I also frequently use.

I use Excel Online mainly for ease of use with my Windows Phone; many of my other are in Google Drive.  I hope the worthwhile changes Microsoft is making don't further adversely affect Excel Online.  So much for cloud backup.  Note, a quick search on Google and Twitter did NOT seem to indicate any problems with Excel Online.

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Microsoft Windows annoyances

Although I am most comfortable using Windows, for the past several years, I have considered switching to Mac OS due to the prevalence of its usage in the software development community.  I have used Ubuntu Linux for more than a year as my primary OS at work and I tried a Mac Mini briefly.  With exposure to these other operating systems, as well as to mobile operating systems, iOS, Android, and even Windows Phone, the annoyances of Microsoft Windows has become more apparent.  These experiences are with Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows 7 Enterprise
  1. If using Windows in a secure manner, by typically logging in as a non-administrator user, Windows will prompts for administrator password even though you've given it moments ago in the same program.  On the other hand, in a Ubuntu terminal window, e.g., you only need to give the root password to sudo once  
  2. Windows seems to be a worse experience for handling files that have spaces in their paths , often not locating these files.  This may not be as apparent to a typical user, but is troublesome for developers working on Windows
  3. Updates that require restarting the computer are too frequent.  While I recommend keeping up with software updates, I suggest "Download updates but let me choose whether to install them" for desktop computers (i.e. computers not on a metered connection) and "Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them" for mobile computers (i.e. on a metered connection).  Defaulting to the recommended option means your computer might restart overnight, losing any of your unsaved work.
  4. Windows sometimes locks files and then doesn't indicate what process has a lock on a file/directory (Process Explorer might help).  This can prevent deleting a file/directory until all programs are closed, and sometimes even logging out or restarting the computer.  You're lucky if you get an informative window like this:
Fortunately Blue Screens of Death (BSOD) are extremely rare now, unless there is defective hardware involved, so Windows has come a long way.