FRONT PAGE EXPRESS
THE WORST MICROSOFT SOFTWARE I HAVE USED

by Brian Grainger: brian@grainger1.freeserve.co.uk

Those of you who have read my musings over the years will know that since having a PC I have been a supporter of Microsoft. I have tried to redress the balance of the constant carping against Microsoft. Only recently I gave my views on why the case against Microsoft by the American Government is flawed. This is not to say that I have not had some criticisms over the years. Primarily, over the past few years my criticism has been levelled at the phasing out of paper documentation. More recently I have started to be concerned over the way Microsoft software likes to do things automatically and in so doing stop the user achieving what they really want. I believe this latter criticism is going to increase, from me at least, if the reviews of Windows 2000 and Office 2000 are anything to go by. The process started with Windows 95 but the benefits of Windows 95 have outweighed the drawbacks. Over the last few months I have been using FrontPage Express to edit this site and I am now prepared to say it is the worst Microsoft Software I have been unfortunate enough to use. More of that later but first a little history.

Microsoft was started by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, with a version of BASIC as their first product. Although Bill turned out to be a supreme business man, in his way, they were both techies. The products the company produced, such as BASIC, MSDOS and Word, appealed to techies. MSDOS allowed the techies to hack around at the command line. Word, with its in-built Word BASIC, allowed the techies to hack around with word processors and all they interfaced with. They came with excellent (paper) documentation, which enabled those who made the effort to find out how to use the systems. It was a techies dream. Those that did not make the effort came to the techies for help, so boosting the standing and ego of the techies.

A few years ago different people were brought in to Microsoft to enable them to expand their market. This meant moving in two directions. First, to the high volume market of the home user. Second to the corporate enterprises.

Now let's be frank here. The average home user is not as clever as a techie. When software came with manuals they did not read them. They then moaned that the software was large and full of functionality they did not need (bloatware). They also griped that they did not know how to use the software (because they were incapable of RTFM). Microsoft's response to this was to:

(a) stop supplying manuals
(b) create wizards to guide the user through tasks
(c) create dancing paper clips which watch what you do and suggest better ways of doing things
and now (d) make a guess at what the user wants to do and do it for them.

The corporate user is driven by different goals. They want their software to be:
(a) cheap
(b) to last without update for as long as possible
(c) to be easy to roll out to the enterprise, preferably at no cost.
(d) to have zero user support cost.

Microsoft addressed (a) by creating volume licensing agreements and in some cases free software. (b) could not really be addressed because it goes against Microsoft philosophy. If they do not make updates every two years Microsoft would have reduced revenues. (c) has been addressed by automated installation procedures, installation wizards and customised installation capability. (d) is being addressed by the task wizards and dancing paper clips of course. However, capability to stop users customising their software has also been introduced.

Now FrontPage Express is not aimed at the corporate market so I will not address here how the moves in that direction have irritated techies. I will simply relate my experiences with it and how it has caused me anguish. Because I was new to Web page editing when I started I guess I was a typical home user rather than a techie. I would temper that perhaps by the fact that I have used Word for years and I am no novice at editing words.

The version of FrontPage Express I use, 2.0.2.1118, is that which came free with IE4 Service Pack1 as provided by Freeserve. I shall refer to it as FPE from now on.

The first task I used FPE for was to create a Home Page for my own web site. Opening FPE provided no great surprises. Its menus and toolbar buttons looked similar to Word. I thought I would open the Help File to have a look at the capabilities. Although the Help File had an index it did not have many entries. When I tried a few it did not take me long to realise that they all pointed to one of THREE help pages. These pages were not written as true help to tell you how to do things but were just general blurb on the capabilities of FPE. I used to extol Microsoft Help Files as the best in the business. The blow caused by removing paper manuals was softened by the excellent Help Files. Now with FPE there is no paper manual and, for the first time ever, the Help file isn't! Any user of FPE, novice or techie, has to work by trial and error.

As I wanted to get my Home Page up quickly I decided to call my friend, who had used the full featured FrontPage, to help me. That was done and we quickly uploaded something to the web. This was done by File Save which automatically called up another Microsoft freebie, Web Publishing Wizard. I also saved a copy of my Home Page on my hard disk as a file. This was done for backup purposes and so I could edit changes offline. Disconcertingly, this function also used File Save! After I had made a change or two and used Web Publishing Wizard to get them online I realised things were not quite right. I was putting image files up as part of my Home Page but when I used IE to check the pages I could not see the images. Eventually I twigged that the problem was that the files were going up named with a leading uppercase letter. My link on the web page had a leading lowercase letter, since my ISP said that filenames should be in lower case.

Perhaps it is worth mentioning in passing here that FPE and Windows Explorer have a habit of asking me on occasions for a filename. When I type it, all in lower case, the software then changes the first letter to upper case. This is NOT what I want and causes problems with web servers. Stop bl**dy changing what I type!

When I managed to change the image file name to remove the leading upper case letter, not using FPE I might add, it went up properly and all was well - almost! I could see my image now but being intelligent I thought, 'What about the file I sent up originally with the leading upper case letter. If it is still there I need to remove it.'

I like to keep things neat and tidy.

'Hmm! How do I REMOVE a file from the web?'

As far as I can see FPE and the attendant Web Publishing Wizard allows you to upload pages to your heart's content. Unfortunately, it does not let you remove any pages uploaded by mistake!

Thank you Microsoft for helping us all to be litterbugs on the web.

The solution to this problem was to get another piece of software which allowed me to remove web pages! There are a number of alternatives for this and I chose WS_FTP95 LE in the end. Not produced by Microsoft and probably no good for the novice but, crucially, does the job properly.

Before I leave the topic of my home page I want to highlight another irritation of FPE. When using the file list at the end of the File Menu I could never be sure whether I was recovering a web based page or a page with the same name stored offline. Similarly, File Save would, by default, try to upload the file, rather than SAVE it offline as we all know and love File Save to do. FPE is inconsistent with other products here. I believe File Upload should be a completely separate function from File Save. Nowadays I partially solve this problem by using FPE solely to edit pages offline. I have to remember to save them properly though. I use the aforementioned WS_FTP95 LE to upload my pages.

Thank you Microsoft for producing such deficient file transfer software that I was encouraged to find some that did the job properly!

Not long after getting my Home Page sorted I had to start editing this site, because Bill Ritchie had to go and serve the wishes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. Unfortunately, my home site has not been developed since but at least I have found out a whole new set of irritations with FPE.

The pages on the web site had been created either from scratch in native HTML or by using the full function FrontPage. My job is to keep those pages up to date and create new ones for the E-Journal. Being a newbie to Web Mastering I decided the safest way to create new pages was to take old ones, modify them and save them with a new name. This became essential when I wanted to put a place marker on my web page. In the technical jargon this is a bookmark, although I did not realise it at the time. I knew what a bookmark in Word was but it still did not click that this was what I wanted on my web page. It is not a book after all. I initially solved the problem by copying a mark from an existing web page and then editing it to have a new name. Once I twigged it was a bookmark I wanted I asked:

'How do I insert a bookmark on my web page with FPE? I know, I'll go to the insert menu .... Damn, no bookmark!'

Slowly, light dawned. I had used bookmarks occasionally in Word. Now Word has a Help File that does! Fire up Word and look up how to insert a bookmark in Word. Go to the EDIT menu and Bookmark. Of course! I want to insert something new so I go to edit something that does not exist! I had not realised this inconsistency in Word before because the Help File was there to help me straight away. With FPE it is a completely different matter. First you have to realise it is a bookmark you want. Admittedly this is a classic novice problem. How do you know what question to ask when you cannot speak the jargon of the software writer? However, once you realise you want to insert a bookmark then you have to go to Edit Bookmark give it a name and click the OK button.

Wake up Microsoft. If you want to insert something the INSERT menu is the obvious place to go for it!

After a time of editing with FPE I thought I had got the hang of it, but then I started to get clever. By now I was keeping a copy of all the E-Journals on my hard disk, a separate directory for each just like it is on the server. When I created a new issue I copied the last issue into the new directory and edited the pages there. As you know each page of the Journal has a standard set of images and links at the top and bottom of each page. I found that on one of the pages an image, and associated link, had been missed off. No problem I thought. I would copy it from the equivalent page in a previous issue. That's what I did:

Open relevant page of previous issue
Select the image
Edit cut
Move cursor to the page of current issue at the point I want the image and link.
Edit Paste

It looked OK. I came out of FPE and fired up my offline browser. I went to the new page, clicked the image and checked the link worked. It did and I happily edited the issue. I then uploaded the complete issue to the web and using IE online I checked the pages were up OK. When I came to the page to which I had copied the image I found the image was not there! Remembering what happened when I created the Home Page for my own web site I fired up WS_FTP95 LE to check whether the image filename had an initial uppercase letter. It didn't. I was now floundering so went offline.

The next day I opened FPE and looked at the offline copy of the page again. The image was there. I was in trial and error mode now. Right clicking the image and choosing Image Properties I was amazed to find the image source was shown as:

file:///C:/DATA/ICPUG/.../top.gif

(Remember the image is not actually part of the page but is called up from a file and displayed on the page).

I opened up the page of the old issue and checked the image properties of the image I had copied. It said:

top.gif

That was fine. The top.gif file was in the same directory so did not need a path to it. This would be true of the new Journal issue.

When I copied the image reference I expected it to be COPIED. Now FPE had decided, all by itself, that I did not want a copy but I wanted a link back to the original image. I can see why there may be circumstances when this is what I wanted but not in this instance. Never mind, FPE assumes what I want, does it and doesn't tell me it has automatically made changes. In this case it is more ludicrous because the path name added refers to my hard disk. Clearly, I would not want a reference to my hard disk when the file is uploaded.

The moral of this is that FPE, or any other Microsoft Software, cannot make assumptions about what users want. The assumption may be correct. Nevertheless, it can be wrong and you are going to upset someone every time it is wrong.

As support personnel know you have to talk to users about what they want. Even then it requires skill to determine what they really want and not what they say! All that software can do is what the user says via dialog boxes. As Microsoft progresses response (d) to home user gripes it is going to cause more and more problems. When it upsets the novice they will just give up in despair. When it upsets the techie then, at the very least, they will waste time working around it. Ultimately, they may just choose to stop using the Microsoft software and use software that lets them get on with the job.

I said earlier that some of the original pages of this site had been hand cranked in native HTML or the full featured FrontPage . Here is a snippet of code from such a page:

<a name="j_1997"><div align="center"><center>
<table BORDER="5" CELLPADDING="1">
  <tr>
    <td><table BORDER="2" CELLPADDING="1">
      <tr>
        <td colspan="2"><b>JOURNAL CONTENTS - 1997</b></td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <th>Volume Number</th>
        <th>Dates</th>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td></a><a href="jnl_1997.htm#19_1">Vol 19 No 1</a></td>
        <td>Jan/Feb 97</td>
      </tr>

You will notice in the first line the code for a bookmark <a name="j_1997">. However the closing </a> does not occur until the 13th line just before a hyperlink reference is defined. Now in my naiveté as a novice there may be good reason for this although I cannot see it. It seems much more sensible to have the closing </a> immediately after bookmark, if only because you know what it refers to. </a> are used to close hyperlink references as well. (You will see I have not lost my zeal for clarity of programming!) If the page containing the above code is opened in FPE then the code fragment becomes:

<table border="5">
    <tr>
        <td><table border="2">
            <tr>
                <td colspan="2"><a name="j_1997"><b>JOURNAL
                CONTENTS - 1997</b></a></td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
                <th><a name="j_1997">Volume Number</a></th>
                <th><a name="j_1997">Dates</a></th>
            </tr>
            <tr>
                <td><a href="jnl_1997.htm#19_1">Vol 19 No 1</a></td>
                <td>Jan/Feb 97</td>
            </tr>

You will see that the first occurrence of the bookmark has moved and it is repeated on every line until the hyperlink reference. The effect of this is not seen when the page is viewed on the web. Also it does not appear to be detrimental to operation. However when viewed in FPE the page has an underline to every line where the bookmark appears. This can be quite irritating. What I am pointing out here is that FPE is making changes to the code on its own accord and without informing the user. In setting up this example I have noticed it makes other changes as well. I have no idea of the purpose behind the changes but, in any event, I want to be in control of changes.

Connected with the above is a case where I want to make a change and FPE will not let me! The above code fragment is a part of a table definition. In another example I had a quite complicated table and when I viewed the HTML, (which can be done within FPE), I found hyperlink references were split across lines. For example, one line may end with '<a 'and the next line start with 'href....' I thought it would be nice to add appropriate carriage returns and spaces to indent the code so the contents of the individual cells of the table could be seen clearly from within the HTML code. I made the changes and clicked OK to close the HTML window. I viewed HTML again and the changes had gone! Not daunted I decided to save the file and then make the changes directly to the HTML by using WordPad. I found that when I later reloaded the file in FPE, edited it and re-saved the file all my tidying up was lost. As soon as FPE loads the file it strips out all the formatting I had applied.

Thank you Microsoft for helping us all to turn tidy code into a cluttered jumble.

I can almost hear their response to this.

'In our modern times you do not have to worry about the underlying code. It is point and click and screen objects.'

Well, they may hold whatever opinion they wish but I also have a right to mine. FPE, however, deliberately changes my work for NO purpose. As the saying goes, the customer is always right - even when they are wrong.

I am reaching my final grouse, until I discover some more problems! One of the pages on this site is a set of links to shareware. It was not a complicated page. It consisted of lines of hyperlinks to shareware sites where each line was preceded by the image of a green dot. There were quite a few lines but each dot was the same image file. When I tried to load this page into FPE the machine just hung. Nothing would cure it except a three fingered salute (CTRL-ALT-DEL) and closing the FPE task. Despite lots of complaints that Windows is not very stable and always crashes I have NEVER had one crash on my home PC since 1992, till now. I put most users trouble down to not setting up their machine properly or not keeping their machine tidy (like removing installed software properly). On my PC it is definitely FPE! After lots of trial and error of removing lines and seeing if FPE would hang the machine I found that up to a certain number of lines all was fine. Add one more line and it crashed. However, if I removed all the green dots all the lines would load OK. Clearly there is some limit at what FPE will cope with. It does not however seem to be related to the LENGTH of the page. As the software is free there are bound to be limits. However it would be nice if Microsoft defined them, rather than the user having to find out by trial and error.

There we are then. A number of faults, some minor but some in the hair pulling class. A friend of mine says, 'The software is free. You cannot complain. Microsoft want you to buy the full featured Front Page.' There speaks someone who uses the full featured Front Page but did not pay for his copy!

After my experiences with FPE I would not be encouraged to pay one penny towards Front Page. How do I know whether its help file is any good. How do I know whether the other faults mentioned above are removed? I was hoping that Word 2000 might be the answer. Then I can forget about a separate editor for web pages and just use Word, which I love. However, the initial reviews I have read suggest that, although it can edit text in HTML, the mixture of text and images in a document is not handled properly. No, the safer bet for the moment is to find some shareware that does what I want.

Your getting complacent Microsoft. Front Page Express is rubbish. No, that is unfair. It is useful, but only just and not for long!

Journal Contents