they's horses on venus?

a while ago i made the mistake of purchasing a cheap computer to run windows so i could use quickbooks for my software development company. i figured having a legitimate bookkeeping solution would be the easiest solution that i wouldn't have to worry about come tax time.

so i plunked down i-forget-how-many-hundreds of dollars for a crappy emachines computer loaded with windows xp and no monitor. i set it up downstairs in the basement, put it on the network, and i control it from up in my office through vnc. i applied the 9 million security fixes and service packs, enabled the built-in firewall, and disabled and uninstalled anything i could that i wouldn't use.

once the machine was up and running, i went to best buy and paid $200 for "quickbooks basic 2004." $200 is a lot for a piece of software, you know. i haven't had to pay for any software in years, so i figured this $200 program better be pretty good.

while installing and configuring quickbooks, the program was very keen on telling me how much the version i just paid $200 for, sucked, and how all the neat features i could benefit from are only available in the more expensive version that i should have paid more for.

ok, fine, spam me with your other products while i'm installing the one i just bought, no big deal. but alas, it doesn't stop there. the program routinely pops up messages telling me that the feature i thought was there, you know, because there's a goddamn menu entry for it, does not exist in the shitty, low grade version i should be embarassed to own.

i am routinely bombarded with messages in this program telling me to use intuit's check printing service, and online data backup service, and online payroll service, and to upgrade and get this feature, yadda yadda yadda. why do they even bother producing this version of quickbooks if half of the features aren't enabled? either make one version that has all of them enabled, or keep the separate versions and stop forcing me to upgrade and tricking me into thinking this version has features when it doesn't.

today i had to prepare a quote for a customer, make an envelope, and send it out. ok, i thought, that's an easy task and my $200 financial software should be able to do that.

i spend a few minutes looking through the menus but find nothing of the sort, so i use the help system and search for "quote". i am presented with a list of topics, in this order:

1. Viewing an estimate
2. Estimates by Customer
3. Estimates do not condense
4. Printing an estimate
5. Making an estimate inactive
6. Deleting estimates
7. Creating an estimate
8. Changing the markup on an estimate

now i'm no software design expert, but i'd think searching for "quote" would bring up "creating an estimate" first. if i just searched for "quote", i am probably not at all concerned with "estimates do not condense", at least not without first learning to create an estimate. anyway, i pull up the 7th entry and am greeted with:

fantastic. of course, the link to "find out what estimate features are available" just tells me i can look at a quote prepared in quickbooks pro, but my version's not cool enough to actually make them. eventually i constructed an invoice and changed around its template to make it look like a quote. how professional.

so now that i have my faux-quote printed, i need an envelope. let me just peruse the menus here to find out how to print a customer's address on an envelope... nope, can't print envelopes. quickbooks is sure to remind me that i can buy envelopes from intuit, but it can't do something as complex as print a customer's address on an envelope i already have.

great, so now i need to copy the customer's address out of quickbooks and use some external program to print it. i don't have microsoft word, so i try abiword. after a dozen attempts while turning various knobs and clicking various options in the printer and page setup windows, i can't get it to print sideways on the envelope. it keeps printing on it like a piece of paper. there's even an option to print on a #10 envelope and the little picture shows it oriented the right way, but it keeps fucking up.

so now i must fetch yet another program to accomplish this task. being the novice windows user i am, i visit download.com and search for "envelope" and get 41 results. and people complain about there being too many open source projects that do the same thing?

i download the second entry listed and see that it's free to try, but $15.00 to buy. $15 to take 4 lines of text and tell my printer to print them? disregarding the program's hideous interface, i manage to paste the address from quickbooks and print the envelope.

so that whole process took a few hours. to create a quote, print it, and print an accompanying envelope. being a windows user is hard.

and of course, i close quickbooks and receive a popup telling me to use intuit's online data backup service. there's no option to disable the message from ever popping up again, and i have now seen it dozens of times. maybe if they keep trying, i'll eventually cave in and subscribe? perhaps i'll just continue to create my own software in the future.