Wow, Frontpage Help Sucks
So I have to work with Frontpage to help pay the bills. I’m naughty, but what can you do. I’m trying to find a file within a frontpage “web” (collection of files to make up a website). This is a big site, something like 2500 files, and of course there not being access to the server itself to do useful things like type find /frontpage/web -name “*.mdb”, so I try to use the edit ->find command. After waiting a couple of minutes for it to finish collecting files to search (I said it was a big site) I give up and hit stop. Ok, maybe Frontpage has a nice handy “find file” tool that I don’t know about. Lets try help.
- Click help
- Sigh as annoying animated paper clip pops up (I thought the big deal about Office XP was they got rid of that little bugger?)
- Type in “how do I find a file” in the search box
- Sigh more when the search “results” (and I use that term very loosely) come up.
My search results for the string “how do I find a file” (or “find file”) give me the following completely useless reults:
- Find a clip
- Troubleshooting toolbars and menus
- About finding clips
- Locale identification numbers for language specific files
- Open the Office README file
And of course, the paper clip dissapears along with the search results when I tab away from the help window, so I have to keep on tabbing back and clicking on him (which makes me feel dirty) to see what the results are to type them here.
Do you see anything in that list that resembles what I wanted? Sure, the word “find” is in there, but that’s about it. Ok, lets try the MSDN search. The results for “find file frontpage” are just as useless, offering me downloads for frontpage, support for frontpage, the office system 2003 beta 2 home page, training in frontpage, and a bunch of other useless shit. Ok, try number three is MSN search, because I saw a post on the new search engine on the scobleizer blog. Not much help here either. Lots of frontpage links, but nothing useful. Sadly, google didn’t help either, but at least the stuff coming up had the words I searched for in it in a semi-meaningful context.
Maybe Robert Scoble can have a word with them on this on my behalf. It’s no secret that Microsoft isn’t a friend of mine, but when I do use their tools it’d be nice if they were useful in helping me so I wouldn’t have more reasons to not like their products.
