More Microsoft Mishegoss

Microsoft seems to have left Earth and moved to the bizarro planet where people walk backward and talk in Tonto English.

Well, okay, maybe that’s a bit strong. Or maybe not.

Awhile back I complained here about Microsoft removing one of the best-designed and most useful features in Access – offline database synchronization.

It appears this removal is an example of the pygmy white elephant theory: If you find a pygmy white elephant, most likely there are more of them.

And so it was that today I tried to publish a project plan, developed in MS Project, in HTML format. It was a nice little feature in the previous version of Project. Now it’s gone.

But never fear, because … Project’s Help system says it best:

Microsoft Office Project 2007 does not support the ability to save a project file as a Web page. Instead, you can save a project as a more flexible XML file. This enables you to apply any style sheet to the XML file.

Got that? One problem: Unless you’re willing to program one of these style sheets, you can’t do anything useful with the XML file, like sharing it with other people so they can view it in their browsers.

That’s right: Internet Explorer (for example) won’t even open the file for viewing.

Aside from that it’s a Great Leap Forward.

Okay, I lied … there’s one more bit o’ nonsense to mention. Office 2007 includes a pretty decent integrated PDF writer. Even though the new release of MS Project is officially part of Office 2007, it can’t make use of it.

The good news about the bad news: PDF995 works just fine with Vista. But really, is this any way to manage a product line?

– Bob

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