Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Uhuh. And now open Word, type a few sentences, apply some minimal formatting to it,
and behold as an animated paperclip pops up and says "Hey! That looks like you're
trying to type a letter! Are you so retarded that you can't figure out how to do that
properly all by yourself, or should I just **** off and let you get on with what you
were trying to do in the first place?" 

Because unlike some systems, MS designs things to be usable both by casual 
customers and expert customers. For the most part, at least. That the 
paperclip offers to help out doesn't mean the system is useless to experts, 
which is what you were contending.

> Is this somehow not the case? Or have they made VS more flexible now?

You can certainly still use the command line if you want.

> for a large project featuring a vast codebase and dozens if not hundreds of
programmers, I would think such cast-iron inflexibility would be a massive,
potentially show-stopping issue.

Not necessarily. It gets everybody working the same way, which is good. 
Since I can't guess what problems your hyperbole refers to, I couldn't guess 
whether they fixed it or not.

>> You can code Excel and Word...all without any programming.
> Uh... really? Isn't that kinda contradictory? :-D

It depends on what you mean by "code". Can you build a spreadsheet without 
coding? If so, you can load the cells from a SQL server without coding.

 > Perhaps by "powerful" you mean "not throught out correctly"? :-P

I'm not sure what that has to do with whether experts can use the system.

> But if you want to 
> find out what function will, say, change cell D7 to today's date... good 
> luck figuring that out from the minimal helpfile.

And if you want to iterate over all the elements in a list in Haskell and 
apply your function to them, good luck figuring out it's called "map" 
without having read a book about functional programming first.

The help file isn't to teach you every feature of the system. Stuff is too 
complex for that these days. You either look it up on MSDN, or you buy a 
book, or you go to a class, or something like that. The man page for GCC 
doesn't tell you how to program, either.

However, entering "set cell to today's date" in help brings back "Inser the 
current date and time in a cell" as the first hit, and "date and time 
functions" as the second hit, so I'm not sure what you're looking for there.

The first hit on "excel insert date function" on MSDN gives you back some 
sample code in VBA, if that's what you're talking about. So again, I'm not 
sure what you're looking for that you aren't finding. About a third of the 
way down the page is the tutorial for "Accessing Microsoft Office Data from 
.NET Applications," which would seem to cover the entire bit there.

Which is not to say it isn't frustrating sometimes to look for 
functionality. But it's not like the information isn't out there anywhere - 
it's just hard to find.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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