Sleazy MS

[mobrien_12]

I have to use MS stuff at work.  I spent a lot of time writing this form in Word 2003 (first time).  I distribute it to the people who need to get it, and they can't use it.  After an hour of troubleshooting, I find out that if you embed fonts in a document with forms, it won't work.  Of course, the problem didn't show up on my computer because I had the fonts installed naitively.  It took me another hour to fix the bloody thing, but by that time I was really pissed off.  I decided to file a bug report.  I go to MS' web site and search for "bug report" and find a page that says if you find a bug in our products call this 800 number.  I call.  Some guy with an indian accent starts off by asking me if I have a virus or a worm on my computer.  

That should have been my first warning.  

I tell him "no, I am here to report a bug."

He asks me questions about the version of word and the product id #, and then says "well, the only option we have for you is pay-per-incident technical support."

I'm furious.  I tell him I don't need tech support, I'm calling to report a bug.  He tells me to call another number to report a bug.  I do.

The phone picks up and a computer voice tells me to get my credit card out for pay-per-incident technical support.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

Wow ... top noch technical support ! Just what you might expect from M$.

Hmmm ... you were writing a form ... isn't it also possible to do that with pdf ? Or does the company make you use only Word and nothing else ?

[mobrien_12]

I don't have acrobat, and ghostscript doesn't do forms.  Plus, every member would have to have acrobat to be able to save changes to a form and have it still be a form.  

I could have done it some other way, outside of PDF, i'm sure.  Probably will next time.

What pisses me off is that MS writes buggy software, and while they say they want feedback, when you try the venue they give you is just a tech support sales number that has no interest in taking a bug report. Very sleazy.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I've known about this problem for some time, it isn't a bug it's a form of copyright protection and has existed ever sine Office 97 (may be even before). The font you've used to create the form with is probably copyrighted and therefore embedding it is treading a fine line between fair use and copyright violation. MS have decided that it's alright to copy fonts if the doument isn't to be edited like a print out or pdf so they've decided to disable editing of documents containing embedded fonts that don't exist on the machine your using.

Of course OpenOffice doesn't have this stupid feature so you could edit the document with it (I've tried this before and it works). I understand your work probably wouldn't be very happy if you installed it on all the machines so your only real option is to change the font to something that's present on all the other machines.

I agree MS' customer support is very poor, they rip you off with their software then try to get more money off you when it goes wrong, I agree they should've at least given you an explanation for this.

[piratePenguin]

Ha, any noob can report a bug in OOo, Firefox, etc., but not MS Office?

Anyhow... Couldn't you just use HTML?  (and/or this XForms stuff I've been hearing about)

[RaZoR1394]

Haha so they outsourced the support to India too. Seems like a lot of companies are doing it these days. All in all it sounds pretty low for such a big company. Sometimes you wonder if the support personal just follows a list no matter what you say.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

Well you can imagine how much cheaper it is to hire Indian workers (and pay them half a cent per hour ... probably the best wage in all of India) than to hire people in the US for $6 an hour or more.

[lovefist233]

everyone farms out their tech support 2 india these days, it gets on my tits they can barely speak english never mind give complex tech support and they seem to hire indias most retarded idiots as well.