Wooden Table shout out from Raymond Chen
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On the old new thing:
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/08/19/8877486.aspx
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Heh. We use a client that supports pasting images directly into the mail, still they insist on doing the "word" thingy. Bonus: Low resolution blurs the screenshots, so I can't see a thing in said screenshots!!!I don't know why it happens, but it happens with disturbing frequency. A customer wants to report a problem, and then illustrate it with a screenshot or two, but instead of attaching the screenshots, they paste the screenshots inside a Word document (and for some reason it's always Word) and then attach the Word document.
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We get a lot emails from people in our company that contain the standard body message: "See attached Word doc for information". And naturally, that word doc contains only text. But these are non-technical people, so I have a certain amount of sympathy (not much... but some). Now when developers do this I have zero sympathy. I've had them send me code reviews as screenshots of WinDiff instead of attaching the actual cvs/svn diff. Icing on the cake is the fact that the change doesn't fit on the screen. Yeah, thanks... that was useful.
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You can usually tell what program with which a person is most familiar by seeing what program into which they paste screenshots. I've seen a couple in Word, but the vast majority (for me, anyway) is in Excel. The worst, though, is the one time a customer wanted us to use a particular image as their company logo in one of our web applications, and they emailed a Powerpoint presentation that consisted of one slide into which they had pasted the logo (around 80x80 pixels).
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I actually complained to my boss that I was fed up of retards sending me screenshots of bugs inside word documents, so he instituted a new policy of not allowing Word documents to be attached to a bug report.
Now I get the screenshots in really helpful excel format, and occasionally a ppt, and once I even got an excel spreadsheet with a Word document/object embedded inside the first worksheet...
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In defense of embedding files in word (and please don't flame me yet. I also dislike receiving images in word:-)) I can see it being used as a container for multiple photos - so they can all be grouped into one file in a comfortable manner. Yes I know there are other ways of doing this, but I also think that those ways are probably beyond the ken of the average user as well.
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No WTF here. I actually like getting Word files with embedded images. It's a helluva lot nicer to work with that than with text+images in different wrappers, where you have to wonder what sentence an image relates to -- you can just focus on deciphering the sentence. I was really annoyed at having to squint first, but when I realized I could just copypaste the image to the editor of my choice (getting the original resolution, too), it became fun. All in all, attached Word files are usually (somewhat) comprehensive and in a logical order. Images named "thisiswrong.jpg", "wrongtext.jpg" and "wrongcolour.jpg" attached to a page of text don't really turn me on.
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@BoredWithWork said:
... and once I even got an excel spreadsheet with a Word document/object embedded inside the first worksheet...
Find them, shoot them!
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I have a client who does the same thing - takes screenshots of whatever app it is and posts it in a wordperfect doc. The kicker for them is that they have dual monitors and dont bother to crop anything. So I have a tiny error message on one side, and then a nice big pic of their desktop on the other, pasted into a program that I do not own (I later resolved that issue).
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I can actually think of sensible reasons why people might resort to this. You almost invariably have to paste a screenshot into a program of some sort, then save it as a file. If all you've got is what came with the machine, you've got a choice between a load of individual .bmp files or a single document containing all of them in a single (possibly slightly smaller) file. Also, even if you're tech-savvy enough to get around this, it's still vastly easier to do helpful things like highlight items of interest or add annotations in something like Word than in MS Paint, let alone an ordinary webmail client's text editor. (I've never experimented with Outlook's 'edit in Word' function, but know enough about what Word does to HTML to be rather wary of it.)
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Thread moved to "Funny Stuff".
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All these holier-than-thou comments are misguided, and here's why: When I hit Alt-PrtScr, where do I paste to make an image file? I'm not a graphics person, so I barely know to have IrfanView installed at all, much less how to work it to crop an image. It's not surprising that images get pasted into Word/Office files, becase that's one of the few well-known places where pasting images from the clipboard works. If Raymond Chen doesn't like it, then he can damn well add "create bitmap from clipboard" to the desktop right-click menu.
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@jonrock said:
All these holier-than-thou comments are misguided, and here's why: When I hit Alt-PrtScr, where do I paste to make an image file?
How about, oh, I don't know, directly into the new email message you're composing? The vast majority of these that I receive are from corporate Outlook users. If they can figure out how to paste (their single unannotated image) into Word, they can damn well do it directly into Outlook instead.
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@cconroy said:
How about, oh, I don't know, directly into the new email message you're composing?
Now... if only Outlook could handle pasting the file in a format other than poorly compressed jpg. A png would be nice.
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@jonrock said:
All these holier-than-thou comments are misguided, and here's why: When I hit Alt-PrtScr, where do I paste to make an image file?
I always open up MS Paint, copy, crop anything that needs to go and save it as a jpeg. Easy and painless.
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@chadsexington said:
save it as a jpeg
Oh, puh-leeze. Why do people keep using JPEG for screenshots? They become blurry and often weigh more than they need to.
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@Spectre said:
Why do people keep using JPEG for screenshots?
Best of a bad lot, I suppose; if nothing else, just about every personal computer in the world has something they can be viewed with.
And is it just me missing something really obvious, or is support for saving in a format other than .bmp something that Paint lacks in any version of Windows older than XP?
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@Jake Grey said:
Best of a bad lot, I suppose; if nothing else, just about every personal computer in the world has something [jpegs] can be viewed with.
Same with gif, bmp and png.
@Jake Grey said:And is it just me missing something really obvious, or is support for saving in a format other than .bmp something that Paint lacks in any version of Windows older than XP?
IIRC win9x and 3.x had paint restricted to bmp and pcx.
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@Lingerance said:
Same with gif, bmp and png.
.gif, maybe, but .bmp can be iffy on some older Macs and .png is relatively recent; I'm pretty sure some older editions of IE can't open them, for example.
@Lingerance said:
IIRC win9x and 3.x had paint restricted to bmp and pcx.
.pcx doesn't appear in the drop-down menu in 2000 Pro, I know that much. In fact, I don't think I've ever even seen a .pcx file.
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@Jake Grey said:
I'm pretty sure some older editions of IE can't open them, for example
PNG has been supported (at least to an extent) in IE formore than a decade (starting with IE4, though there were issues causing crashes when certain metadata was present - IE5 didn't have that problem, though). Although native alpha-channel support didn't appear until IE7, that's not particularly relevant in terms of screenshots.
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Outlook 2007 allows you to view the word document attached to the email as a tab on the email so it's not any more work to open the word document that the pictures are pasted in. Easier to upgrade yourself than change the behavior of your users.
