Terminally Incoherent

The other day this well known Excel issue trickled down to me. If you are to trigger happy applying formating to your excel cells, you eventually hit some sort of hard coded limit. Excel can only handle 4k of formating annotations. I suppose this is an inherent flaw of their binary file format, but then again, who knows. The bottom line is that this has been an issue in every single Excel version up to, and including Excel 2003. Microsoft has
a long standing knowledge base article which gives no suggestions on what to do once you hit that forbidden threshold. Their advice is essentially “don’t use so many different formats”. That’s about it.

The problem is that once you hit the magical number that oscillates somewhere in the 4k range Excel will block you from doing any new formating adjustments by popping up the “Too many different cell formats” error message. In theory, simplifying your worksheet will make the error go away, but to do that you will need to either remove or modify formating on some of the cells or cell ranges. But you can’t do that because of the error. So you end up in an endless loop. To solve the problem, you have to do the precise thing that it prevents you from doing.

The poor guy who fell victim to this bug went through 3 support drones who all told them the same thing - don’t use so much formating. Fortunately he CC’d some managers on the support emails, and eventually it ended up in my mailbox. Which was a good thing since I’m not as immersed in the Microsoft monoculture as the lowly tech support drones. The truth is that there is a solution to this problem, and it’s very easy. But Microsoft won’t even tell you about it because it involves using a competing product.

If you ever run into this issue do the following:

1. Open the document in Open Office
2. Save in the Microsoft XLS file format
3. ???
4. Profit

80% of the time this is enough to solve the issue, because Open Office organizes the formating information slightly differently due to the differences in implementation. For the most part it is a very exact port, and it faithfully mirrors Excel functionality, but there might be few minor glitches when you do this. However, it probably beats re-creating the document from scratch via copying and pasting.

The problem here is that none of the low level guys knew that, or even considered trying it. Living immersed in the monoculture has blinded them to alternative solutions. This is the price we pay for letting Microsoft run our lives.

Yet another post to add to my “Ask The Readers” cycle. What are you guys using for bug/issue tracking. As we all know, there are 3 things that distinguish a real software developer from a ‘just out of school’ newbie. These things are (not necessarily in that order):

1. Real Programmers use Source Control
2. Real Programmers Track Bugs
3. Real Programmers use Emacs and/or Vi

Yeah, you thought that #3 would be about documentation or Unit testing, but it’s not. I’m feeling subversive and mischievous today (after all it’s April first) so you get the Vi/Emacs remark. Deal with it.

It’s easy to pick source control, since after all there are essentially only two worthwhile systems out there: cvs and subversion. There are some other systems that offer cool features, and I’d love to hear why your system is better than the others, but at the end of the day these are the two important ones. They are basic, simple and powerful.

Bug tracking on the other hand is a whole different animal. There are dozens of systems out there, one more bloated than the other. Personally I use a home grown system which I dubbed SITS, and which is my little vaporware project which may or may not become public at one point. It is very basic, and simplistic - not to say primitive. For some time now I have been looking around for alternatives to see if perhaps there is a more organized, polished way of doing these things. So far I haven’t found anything that would suit my needs. So I figured I might as well ask here. What do you use to track your bugs?

I’m really looking for something simple, preferably web based, and if possible something that could work as an issue tracking system as well so that I could keep my syadmin tasks in the same place as software related bug reports. PHP+Mysql is proffered since this is the platform I’m working with, but I’m open to new things.

Suggestions? Let me know what works for you, what doesn’t and which systems do you hate.