Microsoft must perish: OLE embedding

I've been much too kind to Microsoft.

Today I needed to paste some portions of an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document. I'm using Office 2003, latest SPs and fixes, reasonably modern laptop with a GB or so of RAM.

I didn't like the look of the default paste (HTML), so I tried embedding as OLE. It's been years since I've tried that. Excel OLE embedding in Word has always been a disaster (PowerPoint handles OLE embedding quite a bit better). What the heck, maybe 3 years of patches has helped.

It was awful. Truly awful. It sort of worked once, then my machine went on sabbatical.

I tried paste as RTF. Still looked bad.

Ok, I'll try Word's old metafile vector format. Word sat and thought for a while. Then it complained it couldn't locate my network printer.

I pasted as a bitmap.

A bitmap.

That's so retro.

Really, the kindest thing would be to put Microsoft out of its misery. It's a festering sore.

PS. The word on the street is that Win2K works quite well as an OS X Boot Camp option, and you don't have to pay XP fees. Most of us have an old copy of Win2K lying about, and of course for those who feel they've already paid Microsoft in blood for their monopoly there is no Win2K activation requirement ... For running the odd Microsoft app Win2K is just fine ...