Do you agree that products always have room for improvement?
"Every day there are little things in software that we find annoying. Some write books about it, like Annoyances.org, but I thought this site would be more constructive.
BetterSoftwareSuggestions.com is proudly maintained by myself and the developers at SSW."
- Adam Cogan 
The menu location of “Window Update” on IE is inconsistent with other Microsoft products. On IE it is located on the Tools menu (Tools | Windows Update), but on other Microsoft products (including Visual Studio and Office XP) it is located on the Help menu (Help | Check for Updates). Please refer to our SSW Rules to Better Windows Forms Applications.
When you save a document from IE using the browser’s ‘Save As…’ feature, when you look at the HTML, you will see a comment showing the URL address it was when you saved it. This way you can always know where that particular document came from without having to keep the URLs somewhere else or manually editing the document. I want it to go a step further by adding an info bar.
Eg. When you open up a page from “C:\dataAdam\Test.htm”, then there should be an info bar like this that says “This is a Saved Copy of the web page www.ssw.com.au… Click here to load the page”.
Figure: An info bar indicating the live source would be good
It is quite obvious that tabs, such as those used in Mozilla Firefox and Visual Studio .NET are here to stay. In today’s world where people have more and more applications open, tabs help to reduce clutter in the taskbar.
Crazy Browser and Firefox supports a custom list of external tools. Currently IE allows very limited support for this eg. addition to the basic list of programs for email, news, and editing. Currently, to edit the list of external tools you often need to use a registry hack. IE should allow you to set custom executables as external tools in the Internet Options dialog. This would let me use lots of automated tools that are command-line driven.
Figure: Crazy Browser’s list of external tools
And please make it consistent with Visual Studio.NET Tools External Tools.
Figure: Visual Studio has an external tools option
Figure: IE needs the same “Tools | Add-ons” ability as Firefox
When IE finishes loading a page, the status bar simply displays a ‘Done’. What is should display is ‘Done. Load Time xx seconds’. This will help both the developer and the typical user to detect performance issues. This is a standard in Rules to Better Windows Forms.
This Microsoft utility is not ready SQL Server Migration Assistant Wizard for Access.
It was a great tool that was discontinued. It should reappear in Access!
Users should be used to “discover” data… and only afterwards, go into Excel or Reporting Services.
If the cube is decent (Levels / AVG’s, MAX’s, etc), it’s a really cool thing. it’s shocking that we don’t promote it as real world tool for execs and I hope MS keeps upgrading it.
Note: Not saying to show any MDX that is advanced and MDX can be done manually or in Proclarity (not Panorama).
Maybe OLAP data is a bit of a move away from core stuff but then again so is SharePoint integration in Access 12 and that does not seem to be a bad thing.
If you call
SELECT * FROM Customers WHERE CustomVBA_BusinessDays(DateStart, DateEnd) > 200
This would be slower than
SELECT * FROM Customers WHERE CustomerID='BOLID'
Please log to a log table (or a trace file in the current directory).