Microsoft – get your error checking act together

So the world is in a disarray, thanks to you Microsoft and your never ending buffer overflow vulnerabilities. Makes you wonder why you cannot write good tools to test for this internally, with 100% coverage. Surely it can’t be an impossible task.

Nevertheless, why do you insist on having cryptic error messages, for things that are not even an error in Windows or MS Office? Let’s take the example of Powerpoint.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been getting this error everytime I open some .pptx file. “Powerpoint found a problem with the content blah blah. Click to repair…”.

Now it doesn’t repair when I tell it to (because turns out there’s nothing to repair).

The problem was finally traced to incompatible security settings for downloaded files. If you have downloaded a MS Office file, it is automatically set to “unsafe” by Windows explorer, and hence blocked from being opened. You have to manually unblock it.

Well now Microsoft – you have written Windows and MS Office – can you not detect this and give the relevant message. Better yet, give the option with Powerpoint itself to unblock? Why should your customers have to jump through so many hoops for something so simple? Make no mistake – giving an incorrect error message is a “bug”, nothing less.

My 🐈 Spotty could do better debugging than you, Microsoft.