Every program in the Microsoft Office suite.
Compared to what?
Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
21–30 of 261 posts
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#22MS Sharepoint takes the cake. Impossible to navigate, hysterically difficult to use for storing and maintaining content repositories / wiki's.
Also the outlook/skype/teams/lync universe of communication tools is laughably inconsistent, it's very difficult for me to do very simple tasks in these tools.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#23I apologize for saying this in advance but I'd have to say for me it's GIMP. Even after all its feature and popularity I find it extremely hard to use and often end up wasting hours trying to create a simple graphic. As a last resort I always end up booting Windows just to use Photoshop to do the same. I have been trying to move away from Windows to linux and so far I'm super happy with everything. But Photoshop is t…
IMHO, Gimp was much easier to use before they revamped the GUI to imitate Photoshop. For those who didn’t try it, it looked like this: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cleaning_up_Fourie...
The menu layout and structure looks exactly the same, except it's floating, which you get in modern GIMP by default. Can you explain in more depth how it's tangibly different?
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#24Microsoft Powerpoint (and to a lesser extent Word). I lost count of the number of days I spent trying to make my presentations and documents look good (which for me means pixel perfect). To be clear, this isn’t a failing of the software per se. PowerPoint is powerful and lets you do a lot of stuff, but I took desktop publishing lessons in high school, and I’m a bit obsessive to start with. I just have to have everyth…
TBH doing it all in LaTeX you end up down the same rabbit hole, looking for the One True Way to do this and that, at least for me. I do enjoy it a lot as it teaches me about typesetting internals, but it's not faster with one or the other technology.
Because the bottleneck is not the tool, but rather your decision making process.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#25Without a blink, McAfee.
This abomination has the ability to put more than decent computer into a miserable slug. I cannot imagine how much my client would have saved in productivity from all its employees and contractors if that thing was uninstalled.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#26Instana. It helped me troubleshoot some really nasty bugs in production but it always takes me ages to find the information I'm looking for.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#27Excel.
Mostly because it makes you think you can do anything, and you can. It's a rope to hang yourself with.
While Excel is a great prototyping tool, it's really not great for production use. I've seen so many financial calculations attempted on Excel that ended up creating a huge ball of spaghetti, references going all over, VBA code mixed in with DLLs, VLOOKUPS all over, sometimes $A$1 sometimes A$1 (copying behaviour), huge Rube Goldberg contraptions.
And people love it, they often don't think about maintainability or ease of understanding for newcomers.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#28SAS Minecraft
Minecraft has potential to develop creativity though :D
It's a hard one to quantify, but I think sometimes things like MineCraft, lego can boost cognition if used in a deliberate way and one actually takes some learnings from it.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#29Microsoft Access. I think the main problem is I keep expecting it to behave like a normal database. Perhaps if you go in without those expectations you'll have a better time? I don't know, and hopefully I'll never have to find out.
When I had to work with it on a semi-regular basis I kept this list of WTFs that I'd add to each time I finished tearing my hair out trying to fix some seemingly simple thing https://github.com/bourbonspecial/AccessFail/blob/master/why...