| Monday
April 19, 2004 I will be driving home today.
There is considerable mail and other material from the weekend. I have
learned a great deal about management of pst files, More
tonight.
Home. I am goofing around trying to make Outlook work the
way I want it to with multiple PST files and like that. It's not as easy as
I thought it would be, but I'll get there.
Well, I have twice uninstalled Microsoft Office in order to
get rid of Microsoft Outlook. The first time when I reinstalled it, it found
the pst file with multiple copies of this and that, and the inability to use
the Contacts information as an address book. Since I didn't have that
problem when Installing this miserable mess of too clever by half hacks on
the Tablet I can only conclude that somewhere in ther resides pointers to
things. I have now renamed ever pst file to something else, and moved them
to places where I don't see how it could find them. I will now
reinstall Office 2003 and see if I can make it behave.
I hate it when I get error messages that instead of telling
me what to do, refer me to help == only OF COURSE help is no help. I have
extraneous contacts folders in my address book which in fact can't find any
unless I look by hand. When I try to open one of the extraneous ones it
tells me that folder can't be opened, and to remove it I should look at
Microsoft Office Help. Of course, of course, help is no help.
So I have again uninstalled this thing, and killed every
file it might seek help from. With luck it will create a new Outlook.pst
file somewhere -- I really don't care where -- after which I can import my
older structure, and maybe make it work.
Of course it used to work on this machine but I made the
hideous mistake of trying to get the outlook.pst files in the same place on
both the tablet and the desktop where I run Outlook. Stupid of me. Microsoft
doesn't want me to have an easy life.
I am really irked by all this cleverness. One had to be
smart to create a mess like this. And I can't delete the surplus stuff
because delete options are greyed out, and there is no override. If I knew
the file names I would go in with a DOS-Like program for NT files and delete
them by hand...
===================
Well, that didn't work. I can import my contacts, but when I
do I get a huge number of empty contacts folders that cannot be deleted. I
can search among them until I find a non-empty one and then I can find a
name to put on a new message, but setting the contacts folder as an address
book doesn't work, and I can't delete any of the interminable list of empty
ones.
This is completely fouled up. If there were a way just
to duplicate what I have on the Tablet here on the big desktop it would be
all right, but of course Microsoft won't allow that. I am sure all
this imbecility is part of some kind of vast copy protection scheme. I hate
this. I hate it.
There must be some way to restore this thing to where it
used to be, without all that gubbage. There must be some way to uninstall
Microsoft Office without reformatting the disk. So far anything short of
that has left residual files I don't know about that tell Outlook to go get
the bad data structure with multiple personal folders and other stuff I
don't want. Why it wants to do that I do not know. And why I have to go
through my rules every time and change folders to other folders of the same
name I don't know.
This must be the worst user setup interface in all popular
software. I cannot think of anything that is harder to use.
Am I going to have to scrap everything and type all my
contacts in by hand because I can't import the contacts? It all runs on the
Tablet PC, but it will not run properly on the desktop. It used to run on
the desktop. I am sure I have done something unforgivable. And apparently I
can't just start over.
========================
Sable is at the dog wash, muzzled: I am the only one who can
put that muzzle on her. She figures I may have the right, but no other wolf
is going to do that to her. I bribe the people there, and Sable sort of puts
up with it, and it's still a lot better than my doing it.
Microsoft is said to have someone calling me this afternoon.
Perhaps I will be able to figure this out and tell everyone else.
=================
http://www.techcentralstation.com/042004A.html I have not read this TCS
paper in detail, but it looks to be very like what I proposed over a year
ago. Had we done it then we would not be in such trouble now.
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