For all the talk about the merits (or otherwise) of open-source software, sometimes it needs a specific event to make the benefits obvious. Which is exactly what has happened this morning.
I’ve had two things on the go today – an installation of the Wordpress blogging engine; and tweaking a graph within an Excel spreadsheet. Both hit problems around the same time – Wordpress was throwing up errors when I tried to load a particular page, and Excel crashed when I tried to change the formatting of one of the graph axes. My default response in such situations is to Google the symptoms and see if anyone else has come up against the same problems – because it’s very rare that I’m ever the first person to come across a bug. Usually there’s a workaround or a fix within the first couple of pages of results, so normal service can quickly be resumed.
That was the case today – both problems were well-documented in various places; Wordpress in the support forums and Excel in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. But this is where the two problems diverged. While there wasn’t a direct solution to the Wordpress issue, there was at least a description of the problem – whereas the Excel bug was listed with a “we know it’s a problem and we’re working on a solution” notice.
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