Morons.

I hate to blog just to post a funny link, but if you don't care, skip to the bottom, otherwise here follows a brief whinge about w**k. If you'ce had no experience of Microsoft's Great Plains, skip to the end. This will be dull.

Microsoft Great Plains is the biggest piece of monkey that I have ever had the misfortune to use. Normally I am willing to forgive software for various failings - software is software and I don't think anything is infallible. Least of all me.

BUT...

A (hypothetical) O with the "OK" button indicates that by pressing alt+O in a screen will automatically select the same said OK button. All well and groovy. An equally hypothetical N given with the "Next" button means that a new document will be opened. The whole program gies priority to all alt functions to the menu bar - fair enough. But it still hands out the same alt functions willy nilly to other windows, seemingly at random.

You cannot look at more than one order at a time. This is really useful when you are editing a very large order and your boss phones wanting to know how the order for XYZ is doing...

You can't close an order, although no information has been entered. You can't delete the order because you don't have enough privileges. You can void the order, but it won't let you as you haven't entered the order type, the order ID and created a master number.

You cannot close an enquiry window if the item enquired about does not exist. You must first delete the line and then close it. Similarly if an item in an order does not exist, you cannot void the order.

There is no such thing as "Fuzzy" searches. You have to type in exactly what you are looking for, from left to right. No wildcards either. This is really useful when customer do not know what they are looking for, only the author, part of an ISBN or part of a title.

Anyway... this made me chuckle.