The Last Word

Yesterday, I installed Office 365, and retired some of the oldest pieces of software I ran on my home machine – Office 2007:

That particular suite spanned:

• 13 years
• 2 different machines
• 3 versions of Windows
• 3 jobs
• 1.5 kids (my younger daughter hadn’t even been born when I first installed it)

Word and Excel were by far the most used components of the suite, but PowerPoint was sprinkled in there as well.  Word ran like a champ all that time.  Excel, though, developed a tic in the last couple of years.  Somewhere along the way, it decided it needed to try to install itself again every time I booted it up.  The first couple of times I tried to let it finish, thinking that something had gotten corrupted and it was trying to run a Repair.  What I found, though, is that it didn’t matter if I let it finish or not – it would run through it again the next time I started it.  So, I took to cancelling the installation, which required 3-4 extra clicks (depending on whether I caught it soon enough after it started), and several additional seconds.  I dealt with it, but I’m not sorry to be finally rid of that extra boot-up sequence.

With Office 2007 gone, I think the title of "oldest piece of software" falls to Visio 2007.  I’ll get around to that one eventually.