MS Excel won't let you open two files that have the same filename. Even if they are different files (in different folders). Do you know how much this ticks me off? If I download a file from the network drive at work, edit the copy, and then decide to re-merge some of my changes into the original document, I just can't do it. I guess even with billions of dollars a year, MS couldn't afford to hire someone who's heard of absolute vs. relative pathnames?

Behold MS Excel in all its glory.

Contrast with something like Vim, which will let you "open" the same file TWICE, i.e. the same buffer in two Vim windows. And when you edit one of them it will edit the other. And if you try to open an already-open file in another entirely separate instance of Vim itself, Vim will gasp ASK you what to do. Open anyways? Abort? Recover the other Vim instance's buffer?

My loathing of MS Office knows no bounds. If I had to rate the parts of Office according to suckitude, Access would certainly top the list, but Excel is a very close second.

A while back I stopped coding in Perl and starting using Ruby for mostly everything. Today I had occassion to use Perl again, because there's no good working equivalent to Perl's Spreadsheet::WriteExcel that works well in Ruby; this Ruby spreadsheet package is a bit too buggy. (It's not my choice to use Excel, but they're paying me to use it. I can't complain. Well, I can complain here I guess. And will.)

One thing I notice about Perl is that Perl sure does give your fingers a workout. I looked at the fairly simple 103-line Perl script I wrote, and it has exactly 118 dollar signs. That's a lot of Shift-$ finger reaching, if you think about it. Ruby doesn't even use curly braces around blocks; it uses do and end, which type quite nicely. Ruby does use a lot of pipes, but I can easily do a one-handed Shift-| maneuver if I lift my right hand off the home row. Think of the potential gains I will have when I'm older from the avoidance of arthritis alone.

Try to come up with a more petty gripe than this. I dare you.