Why so “critical”, Microsoft?
Let’s do a little free-association exercise.
When you hear the words “Microsoft” and “critical update“, what do you think of? I know personally, my first thought is “OMFG another Microsoft security exploit!“.
Given this knee-jerk reaction I assume I share with many, why do you think Microsoft would label the latest Office Mac update 12.1.1 “Critical”? A quick scan of the 153 MB update shows a bunch of bug fixes, but unless you consider things like “PivotTable reports are improved” and “Reliability is improved when you reference or link to a sheet name that resembles a cell reference” as CRITICAL, odds are you thought, as did I, that the engineers at Microsoft had discovered and closed some sort of major zero-day backdoor exploit.
As a sometime programmer, I understand the desire to make sure people take a look at something you spent a lot of time working on (my kids are always showing me their drawings they spent 2 minutes doing) but I suggest Microsoft’s Office team choose a slightly less “crap your pants” adjective to describe their next round of bug fixes. Like maybe “Install if you get a chance, or not, whatever“.
We want Mac chicks.
Meh. At least Microsoft publishes patches and fixes for bugs. Apple has this habit of waiting months before actually submitting a fix. An example would be the recent bug in Safari. A patch was up for Windows in days, yet Mac still hasn’t gotten it.
PC Mag also reported a similar stat, then Microsoft does better research and fixes problems faster than Apple.
Hey doc, come on now. PivotTables may be one of the most important things in my life. Other than an improvement in the taste of oxygen I can’t think of any improvements I want more than PivotTable Reports.
I think ‘critical’ is the wrong type for this, it SHOULD read ‘totally awesome and important’. Duh
Links to cell references, or rather what resembles them I don’t really care about.
For the past 20 years I’ve been working on a book entitled “PivotTables : Better than sex”. It’s a work in progress but its coming along.
LoL at the post and the response.
I second that. Mac Chicks! 🙂
This actually was a needed update. 12.1 hosed file type associates in certain cases. If you saved an office attachment from an email app, when you double click it it would come up blank. You could still open it correctly with file->open.
I’m not sure what else it did, but 12.1.1 fixed this.
It was a real pain in the ass.