J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

Web Sites That Suck

Ted French has a spreadsheet blog at About.com: Ted's Spreadsheet Blog. Here's an item from that blog: Excel Timeline Template. That blog entry has a link. Click the link and you go to an article at About.com.

The article has a link labeled "Downloading the template". Click that link and you go to another page at About.com (it's one of eight pages associated with this stupid article).

That new page has a link to Microsoft's free timeline template. Click that link, and you're finally taken to the download page at microsoft.com. But the page is presented in a frame, with About.com's URL still displayed in the address bar. I hate that!

And Microsoft proves that they are just as sucky. I couldn't even download the damn template because of a Template download problem:

My Web browser is Firefox -- which I much prefer over Microsoft's browser.

Sure, I could have download that template directly from Excel 2007. Or, I could have fired up Internet Explorer and download it. But by then I'd lost all interest in that template -- which probably sucks, anyway.

Why is Microsoft checking for a 10-year old product and denying access because it's not installed?

Now, the big question is: Which sucks more? About.com or Microsoft.com?