Installing Office is as easy as 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15

Saturday, December 13th, 2008

I was recently installing MS Office 2008 (for Mac) on a brand new hard drive. 90% of the time, installing software is simple: drag the app to the Applications folder and you are done. 8% of the time, it’s slightly more complicated: run the installer, agree to the terms, click continue and you are done. The other 2% of the time is Adobe installers and Microsoft installers.

Adobe installers have been covered other places, so I won’t repeat all that here.

Microsoft actually uses the native Mac OS X installer, but still manages to make it extremely over-complicated. I’ll go over the install step by step…

Double-click the installer. This is what I see:

Nothing strange there. Click Continue.

I’m not really sure what this means, but I’ll click Continue.

License Agreement. Standard stuff. It’s worth noting the strange line breaks around “updates, supplements, Internet-based services, and support services”. Continue.

Yes, I really really agree. Agree. Move on.

Quit everything. I guess that makes sense. Continue Installation.

Product key. Got it. Don’t know why it needs to be displayed in the installer, since it clearly says that it’s also in the About menu of each app and when you call MS for help, they’ll tell you to go to the About menu. Whatever. Continue.

A breakdown of what can be installed. Nothing really strange here except that if you add the size of each component, it totals 585mb. However, the installer claims that the total size of Office is 927mb. Remind me again why I don’t really trust MS software? Click Install.

Alright…installer progress bar. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for! The heavens open and the angels sing! Glory to all!

Remove Office? What now? I just installed Office. Oh, it is telling me that it will find older versions (including the demo, which apparently causes “problems”) and remove them. I would think that it could check on its own and then warn me if there is going to be a problem. I won’t have any previous versions because this is a brand new hard drive. Continue.

It’s done searching for other versions of Office. Good to know. Continue.

“No version of Office were found on this computer.” I assume it means that no previous versions of Office were found, since it just finished installing Office 2008. This is not a shocking revelation because, as you may remember, this is a brand new hard drive. Continue.

Um. Riiiight. Continue.

Ok. Successfully installed! The only step left is to…”run the Setup Assistant to complete the process”? What the fuck? Close.

The installer quits and the MS Updater launches. In a confidence-inspiring manner, the first thing it shows me is this:

Yikes. If it’s any consolation, I don’t understand the event sysodisA message either. Ok. (I don’t even want to think about clicking Edit.)

And finally:

More progress bars to finish up my Office installation. On the plus side, at least I had my Identity upgraded! And it only took 15 steps. Continue.

Obvious question: why use Office at all when iWork is so much better? One bone-chilling word: Entourage. We use Exchange for email at work and the only Exchange client for Mac is Entourage. If Apple ever gets their act together and offers full Exchange support in iCal, I will dump Office off my machine that very day.

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Friday, August 15th, 2008

So I launched Photoshop this morning, just like I do every morning, but this time I was presented with the always-fun “There is an update available for Adobe Updater” message. Of course, this is silly, but whatever, I’ll just run the update and get on with my day.

As with all Adobe updates, it won’t budge until I quit Safari (?) and then it takes 20 minutes to install. So that’s 20 minutes with no Safari (fun) and no Photoshop (work). Awesome. Maybe there’s a banana in the kitchen I can eat.

Eventually, this dialog pops up:

My favorite part is how they never replaced the obvious “We Need A Dialog Title Here” text. The other fun part is how clicking OK (which was highlighted by default) does nothing. To continue the update, I have to press Cancel.

Despite the name of the Cancel button, the installation proceeded and after another 5 minutes of bated breath watching the completely inaccurate Adobe Upgrader progress bar, I had a shiny new update of Acrobat Reader. (Which I never use.)

They make my brain hurt.

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

Uh…are you sure about that logic?

And the only option available to me is to press “Continue”. Where does that button take me? That’s right, back to itself. wtf.

It’s like the people at MS never really think all the way through the workflow. They are huge company with unlimited resources. You’d think they could have a meeting where somebody says “Does it really make sense to quit the updater to update?” I dunno. I guess that’s why I don’t run a huge company.