Pale Musings

Some people prefer to install everything they believe they will need on their workstation as soon as possible. Others tend to wait until they need it before installing. I tend to fall somewhere in the middle of that road.

I have a list of things I know I use every day which gets installed right off the bat. Next comes things as I need them. I know I will probably use them at some point, but it’s not worth taking the time right now, rather it’s worth taking the time later. It is simply a matter of priority, or procrastination. You decide.

Recently I ran into the need to use Microsoft Visio. I had Office 2007 installed of course, I use that almost daily. Visio is one of those things that I know I will need, but I usually only have the requirement for 1 week out of 6 or 7. This was that week so I happily inserted the DVD and let the installer work its magic.

Now comes the fun part. I created a nice high-level use case diagram for a preliminary requirements document. I decided that I would simply copy and paste it into my Word file, no problem! I noticed that the paste operation had left an unsightly amount of white space at the time.

No biggie, I’d simply convert it to a bitmap and then crop it. First, right click on the diagram. There’s my convert option, now we are cooking! Click on the option and…

Now how useless is that? I have the option to convert it from a Microsoft Visio Diagram to a Microsoft Visio Diagram. ugh! Thanks a lot, MS!

Now you might say that I simply have something wrong, or I only have to click x option to get what I want. I will argue that I shouldn’t have to do that. It’s a simple operation. There’s a menu that promises a conversion. There should be something to convert it into other than the format it is already in.

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