jmorriso@fs0.ee.ubc.ca (John Paul Morrison) (07/07/90)
I mentioned earlier that I couldn't get help to work in Excel. Well, here's the dirt from Microsoft: I would press F1 or select Help Index from the menu, and the disk would churn a little, but nothing would pop up. Microsoft told me that there was a bug in ther International section of the control panel. To get help working, you need to have it set for just about everything American: Country = US, Language = English(American) Keyboard = US. Even then it is reported to be flakey. Heaven forbid anyone should want any other settings! I guess the rest of the world isn't important enough to beta test. If you are having problems with Excel, or other programs that use this information you should go back to the defaults and then change as little as possible to what you'd like it to be. The girl at Microsoft seemed to focus on the list seperator: it should be a comma; setting it to international English gives you a period. I managed to set some things back to sensible formats instead of American style: stuff like metric, ansi dates, 24 h time. As you say in America: 'Have a nice day!' :-) I say, old chap, must be going. Do come for tea some time, Ta ta, John Paul
strobl@gmdzi.UUCP (Wolfgang Strobl) (07/08/90)
jmorriso@fs0.ee.ubc.ca (John Paul Morrison) writes: >I mentioned earlier that I couldn't get help to work in Excel. Well, >here's the dirt from Microsoft: >I would press F1 or select Help Index from the menu, and the disk would >churn a little, but nothing would pop up. Microsoft told me that there >was a bug in ther International section of the control panel. To get help >working, you need to have it set for just about everything American: >Country = US, Language = English(American) Keyboard = US. Even then >it is reported to be flakey. Heaven forbid anyone should want any other >settings! I guess the rest of the world isn't important enough to beta >test. Having used the German version of Windows for a while now, I must agree. Windows 3 may have been in beta test for more than a year in the USA, but I doubt that there was ANY real beta test of the German version. The translation into German is ugly, at best, and often unintelligible. Perhaps this is why they have omitted half of the help files in the German distribution? There are bugs which are closely related to the translation step and which show that the translator has never seen a German keyboard, for example. The following are two of my findings, in temporal order. The file manager defines accelerators CTRL+/ and CTRL+\ for "select all" and "deselect all", they are visible on the first menue entry of the file manager, and they are described in all the documentation (this .hlp-file isn't missing). They are one of the first things one tries out while learning to use the file manager. Do they work? No. The slash "/" is a shifted key on the the German keyboard, and the backslash can be reached using the right alt key, only. By poking around I found that CTRL+^ and CTRL+# work. So far so good. Now to the really nice terminal program. Unfortunately it is not possible to type any of the characters "{[]}\@|~" using this program. I have ordered eight copies of Windows for the PC group of the company I am working in. One of my arguments in favour of Windows was the terminal program it comes with - we use a lot of unix machines with dial in modems, here. Now try to explain to an unix user that he has to live without the pipe symbol and without the @. I tried to analyse this behaviour a bit, after recognizing that terminal beeps, if it get's one of the above keys (and a few more which are accessible via the right alt key), and that it is silent for all other right-alt-key+something combinations. I dug out the SPY utility from the Windows 2.1 SDK (we don't have V3, yet). To my surprise, it worked. It told me that terminal gets a WM_SYSCHAR with the correct Ascii-Code and responds with a beep. Other key come as WM_CHAR. Perhaps an error in the message loop? The Microsoft hotline was friendly, but of no help. The first answer I got was a bit curious: I told him my problem, and he replied: "Do you know that Windows uses the ANSI character set?". Me: "Yes, of course, but I am using pure ASCII characters, only". "So its your problem, then", he said. A short period of silence on both sides. After explaining to him that the printable 7-bit-ASCII characters are contained in the ANSI character set used by Windows, I got the usual answer: This problem may be fixed in one of the following versions of Windows. We will report it to our parent company in the United States. I have heard this before. The current state is that I talked to someone else at Microsoft Germany, whos name I got from a friend, and am prepairing the error report he requested. Two questions to the readers of this group: - is anybody in the United States using a non US version of Windows? - are there other errors in national versions of Windows, which I have missed? I am looking into Windows itself only, for now. Please mail, I will post a summary. Wolfgang Strobl #include <std.disclaimer.hpp> PS: Does somebody have a fix for the date/time bug in the notepad editor? It makes the .LOG feature quite useless.