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XLNotes EXCEL Add-in
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Posted by Wayne K
Feb 6, 2014 at 08:31 PM
Can anyone confirm that XLNotes is out of business? They’re still for sale at BJD but the website address brings up “Server not found”. I was unable to find any other information on what happened.
Wayne
Posted by Listerene
Feb 7, 2014 at 02:00 AM
Wouldn’t surprise me. V 8 is completely unreliable and loses notes all the time. Their tech support was totally unhelpful. V 2 is still working fine though, even in Excel 2013 (as long as I install Excel 2010 first).
XLNotes is a really great idea, it just needs better programmers.
Posted by 22111
Feb 15, 2014 at 12:51 AM
“XLNotes is a really great idea, it just needs better programmers.”
I had been tempted to use XLNotes for prof. work, but refrained from that, by fear of possible unreliability, and again, it seems I was right.
But then, please, let’s bear in mind that Excel is not programmed in a way that assures add-ins might work flawlessly, and so many core info is withheld by MS, so it’s not necessarily the developers to be blamed.
You see, so often I strain your nerves here by blatantly criticising bad programmers, but I know, from experience, that sometimes, programmers are NOT to blame: When I programmed “Manuscript”, back in the Nineties, I did it with “ToolBook” (Asymetrix, then Click2Learn, and now SumTotal, but in fact, it’s another MS-derived piece of sh**, by Paul Allen, who owns one of the largest yachts in this world, but was, at least at the time, not able to make that piece of sh** someway stable), and I simply did not have any chance to succeed with it commercially, since TB’s memory M was so buggy (confirmed by numerous other developers in those times) that the programming language in itself caused the crashes of my product, whatever I might have tried.
A similar phenomenon could work here, Excel’s memory M or other idiosyncrasies that simply make it impossible to develop a really stable “notes in cells” add-in for it.
So don’t blame the developers too early here; let’s blame ourselves: Anybody (me included) who wants such functionality in Excel is just too “lazy” to create the appropriate “Access” applic (which then could even access Excel data)...
MS is simply evil, and I just feel compassion for developers who tried, for years, in vain, to make some MS add-in work - you think they would have got the slightest “help” / assistance (e.g. with info about withheld details) from MS? - think again: MS is evil, it’s as simple as that. (And that’s why, if Excel, as SS, is more or less inevitable today, Access should be avoided, since in that field at least, there’s plenty of better alternatives.)