There is something about the rows and columns of a spreadsheet that I guess just invite a lot of abuse. I always knew that Excel was the go-to database program for those who were confounded by SQL or Access or even Filemaker, but still some of the posts from our readers were extraordinary. One group of three took nine days to code up an inventory tracking app. That is just insane.

But it was when folks mentioned, several times, that they had seen word processing done on Excel that I had to just say, stop me before I hurt myself. Printing out labels? Or other documents? Drawing a map? Company brochures? Resumes? Don’t people know of Word or its equivalent? Haven’t they been taught anything about some other software tool? Apparently not. “They didn’t know that Word existed,” said one of our readers.

Others use Excel for presentations, putting each slide on a separate worksheet. Yes, I guess you can do that. But if you are going to go through the motions of cut and pasting a graphic, why not use something that already is made to do that, like, uh, Powerpoint?

Excel of course isn’t the only spreadsheet game in town, and now there are any number of online services that can be abused and twisted into odd applications. The online database company TrackVia recently came up with their own quirky apps that their customers have built in their service, including tracking the schedule of “exotic dancers”, free taco nights at the local ball park, and a museum in France that has an antique wine database. You can read that one here.

How about you? What is the worst Excel app you’ve seen in your career? Feel free to email me or share your comments below.

But then there were a bizarre series of circumstances. My order was summarily cancelled by AT&T. I thought at first that there was something wrong with my credit card, so I tried a debit card. Same process: initial confirmation emails followed by a cancelled order. That was perplexing. Now I was getting steamed: a simple five-minute process to avoid the hassles was turning into a project. What gives? It turns out that I have a fraud alert on my credit card, due to some ID theft circumstances a few years ago. And apparently, when you purchase something from AT&T online, they don’t have any way to check with you out of band to see if that purchase was legit. Or so I guessed.

If you have ever had one of your purchases challenged by your bank or credit provider, then you might want to watch this video showing you what Clairmail is doing with its mobile fraud prevention system. You can’t buy this as an individual: they sell just to banks and other financial institutions. Watch this short video explanation:

But you get the idea: they send you text messages when suspicious activity is flagged on your account, in real time, while you are in the store, about to make the purchase. No more awkward moments hearing that your card has been declined because you failed to alert your bank that you are traveling overseas, or because you placed a fraud alert marker on your account. A quick text to confirm that it is indeed an intended purchase and you are good to go.

Clairmail has “hit a home run” with their mobile solution, according to Sean Mulvihill, the VP of Sales and Marketing Operations for the company. Their software is found in many of the nation’s top banks and they have other products that enable banks to white-label online services for an entire secure mobile Web app. I just wish my bank were one of their customers.

• First, it is so often said that you have to find your passion. But it is very true. If you are going to suffer the long hours and the many frustrations of starting your own business, you need to have something that is going to power you through the darkest times. If you come up with a business idea that doesn’t get your groove on, drop it and think of something else.
• Find the narrowest niche you can and fill it completely and hopefully exclusively. It doesn’t really matter what you do. What matters is what everyone else isn’t doing, and how you can complement or fill in the gaps. The narrower the niche, the better. It helps if you can explain your niche in a short sound bite too, because that is what you are going to be doing a lot of. And don’t be afraid to change to a new niche when the market shifts or as you get better at understanding what your customers need, too. You aren’t going to be running MegaCorp (at least, not yet), so being flexible is key.
• Understand your own limitations and use them to decide on the nature of the businessyou wish to create. For years I have had a one-person freelance writing business, designed purposely not because I am anti-social, but because that is my preferred work style. You need to think through the implications of your ideas and understand what you are getting yourself into with the particular business you have in mind. One friend of mine designed her freelance business around a small staff, because that was what she was comfortable with. Different strokes….
• Building a website because isn’t the same thing as building a business. While is certainly is the case that many businesses are going to have some kind of online presence, they just begin with the website. A corollary to this is:
• If you aren’t technical, find someone who can help and treat them well.Make that: treat them extra well. When I built my first website back in the early days, I hired a kid all of 19 years of age. Now I would hire even younger: they have the skills, and they work cheap. But sometimes you want to partner with someone with more maturity, and realize when that is needed.
• Pick domain names, corporate names, and other names to match and be easy to speak and remember. This is so important. There is a site called KnowEm.com that can help you figure out if your chosen name is available on hundreds of social networks, and even search the US Patent and Trademark Database. This is a good place to start.
• Don’t forget about email newsletter marketing.Email may be going the way of the dinosaurs, but it is still a very powerful tool that can help spread your word and get you customers. One friend of mine built up his business big time with a weekly newsletter: over a year he had more than two thousand subscribers, and a regular business. The service provider that I use for my email newsletter charges me the grand sum of less than $5 a month.
• Speaking of monthly costs, keep your recurring costs low. It is amazing what kinds of services you can get these days for free or nearly so in just about everything. Look at what you can get on open source sites. You can host your own blog, set up your own domain, sign up for cloud-based accounting, and a lot more for less than $500 a year, in some cases a lot less. It used to cost me $500 just to have a server sit in a rack someplace. My friend Bruce Fryer has a site called CheapBastardStartup that has links to running his 100% virtual corporation. He suggests raising $50,000 and get a product and customers and then go after the big money once you have proven your concept. But I suggest starting with even less dough – say $5000 – and see how far you can run with your idea with that. Don’t figure on paying yourself a salary, at least initially.

I am sure that there are lots more ideas for getting started. Feel free to share them in the comments.

We certainly stand at a crossroads, as we move from the “golden age of blogging” into whatever we are going to call things this year or this moment. I tend to think of this as the post-blogging era.

Jeremiah Owyang wrote on his blog last week that all future blogs will have something different, such as new mixes of media, different kinds of long-form content, and new opportunities for different kinds of celebrities to shine.

It used to be one point of view per blog, but that has changed, particularly as blogs (such as RWW) have grown and added professional journalists. Even tying yourself to a particular high-touch staff isn’t needed anymore: look what happened over at Engadget.com when Patel and Topolsky and others left the site last March. Sure, traffic took a small hit initially, but pageviews bounced back up.

What we mean by “long-form” content is changing too. It used to be a 600 word post was brief, now that is considered long. My post on RWW was more than 1100 words: that was really long! Same is true for videos: three minutes is now the cutoff point.

Data-drive analysis is now more important than ever. Adrian Holovaty changed the nature of daily journalism by transforming a collection of soldier Middle East war deaths into a searchable online site for the Washington Post, and now other newspapers have programmers to assemble their own curated data collections.

And then there is DocumentCloud.org that is used by a large number of blogs and traditional media to show the sources behind their reporting. You click on the button at the top of each article, and then yellow highlighted text appears that has hyperlinks to the original source materials. Think of it as when you had to show your work in high school math class. It is an intriguing idea.

It used to be that one went online to avoid add-on fees by travel agents, but as the airlines have made visits to bankruptcy courts more frequent (American is the most recent), they have come up with a variety of ways to squeeze more money out of the public without being so, well, obvious and clear. There are baggage fees, fees for using particular forms of payment, and fees for sitting in those extra-spacious exit row seats. Buying a ticket online is now akin to buying a computer from Dell: there are so many screens to click on to avoid various up-sells (rental cars? hotels? a new printer cartridge, maybe?), that the process is a user experience nightmare.

But the fee asterisk and its associated add-ons are onerous. Spirit, for example, charges all sorts of fees depending on the ticket. They claim the online booking fees are “optional” since you can avoid them by going to the airport and buying your tickets there. Right. As if we don’t spend enough time waiting in airport lines. You can read their fine print here and it will take you a while. Here is a screenshot showing you that a $164 round-trip ticket would cost you an additional $62 in fees.

Granted, they aren’t alone in charging high fees for online purchases. Many of these are local and other taxes that the hospitality industry has to bear. But the objection is how the consumer is informed of them during the online purchase process. Spirit doesn’t divulge all the fees until you have selected your flights and are getting ready to pay them, which is understandable given the many nuances of its complex fee structure. But that is still reprehensible, from an airline that advertises $9 fares that turn into something quite a bit more.

As another example, two tickets for Book of the Mormon, the popular Broadway show, can have almost as much in add-ons as Spirit does. The site Broadway.com is at least a bit more upfront about what they charge you, as you can see here at right.

Easyjet, the European low-fare airline, has different ticketing prices depending on the way you pay. “All bookings will incur a £8.00 booking fee except for bookings made by Visa electron (a debit card that isn’t available in the US and Canada) which is free.” Then you are presented at checkout with this somewhat confusing screen at left.

So the biggest number on the page is the fee that you would pay with a regular credit card, that includes the surcharge. Got it? This is a user experience nightmare.

Concert tickets for years have had high add-on fees, but at least the online concert ticket booking sites are more up-front about them. Still, two tickets for an upcoming show of George Strait for example that started out costing $80 a piece add $13 for various fees at Ticketmaster, more if you want them mailed quickly to you.

That is still less of a proportion than what the airlines add on.

Some thoughts for the future to improve the experience:

• Limit the upsells. I shouldn’t have to click through more screens to decline offers at checkout than it took to buy the original item.
• Disclose the fees at the beginningrather than at the end of the purchase process.
• Simplify, as Thoreau once said. If you need to explain your fees with an asterisk, it is time to get rid of both.
• Keep them below 10% of the total price.Otherwise it isn’t really a fee, it is just generating more revenue.
• Make it easy to find the fees. At least Spirit posts them on their site in plain sight.

I heard Rhodes a few weeks ago on the radio promoting his book, and there is a review in this weekend’s NY Times. She is a fascinating study in how someone with both beauty and brains can not necessarily make the best of both worlds.

Lamarr’s invention, which she developed with her music composer neighbor George Antheil, came about through an odd inquiry. Lamarr was interested in a boob job and Antheil had written about early efforts in that area, again presaging another important intersection of Hollywood and technology. The duo went on to get a patent in 1941 for a new technique for frequency-hopping radio communications. While not taken seriously at the time, it ultimately was deployed by the military in the 1960s during the cold war. While the technique involved piano rolls, the basis of frequency hopping continues to be used as part of spread-spectrum radio communications that are in common use today. Along the way, Lamarr made many movies (although none quite as provocative as Ecstasy, the one cited earlier) and married and divorced six husbands, one of who was a Nazi arms merchant that got her interested in developing new technology for the war effort once she fled to America. She lived to be honored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation a few years before she died in 2000. Rhodes’ book is the first detailed recounting of her various inventions with Antheil.

It is hard for many of us to grok a movie star with her trips to the patent office, but she was the real deal. Rhodes is the author of many intriguing history of science works, including the story of the Manhattan Project, and his new book is worth reading.

Lamarr once said that “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” She was anything but.

The webinar is held this Thursday at 12:30 pm ET.

You can register for the webinar here, download the white paper Dec Cloud Integration here, and view the slides that I will use for the event here.

Why addiction? Let’s face it, we have enough keystroke and command syntax memory that switching to something else isn’t useful. And yes, there are all these fancy tools that didn’t exist a decade ago, or even last month. Okay, I’ll admit it: my name is David and I have been a Microsoft user for 20 years. I would guess Eric is too. But retire Office? No chance.

Comfort should count for a lot when you boot up your PC and open your apps. At least, if you use a PC. My officemate, who does a lot of accounting, certainly is a master of QuickBooks for his clients. But for some of his record keeping, he writes in ink in a paper spreadsheet ledger. It is what he is most comfortable with, and obviates the need for him to carry a laptop around. Makes sense to me.

Certainly, many of us have had abusive relationships with Office over the years. Using Excel as our go-to database app to build tables, for example. And the oft-cited death-by-Powerpoint slideware. I have sat through far too many presentations, and more to come I am sure. But I, like many other professional speakers rely on Powerpoint to produce beautiful presentations that have few if any words on each slide. And while there are online substitutes like Prezi and Zurb, Powerpoint still has a lot of utility. Same with Excel: I learned how to do pivot tables back in grad school, and while I couldn’t do one today it is amazing that this is just another spreadsheet function.

Speaking of function count, the original Word had less than 50 functions, and probably most of us still use less than these same 50 functions in our daily work. Do I need 457 different type fonts and being able to adjust my line spacing and right-justify my text? Not really, since much of what I write ends up on the Web and it is more important for me to know HTML format codes than where to find something in Word’s ever-more-obscure menu trees. Does Office need any new features? Probably not. What is clear is that many companies have stoppped upgrading Office, and are staying one or two versions back. Why bother? The new features aren’t all that compelling, to be sure. And once a few people start using the newer versions, you have document format incompatibilities. That is probably what Eric refers to by saying we need to retire Office. Maybe we just need to stop upgrading and paying the Microsoft tax.

Speaking of which, sure there are plenty of alternatives. Like WordPad. It comes free with Windows. But they are all less than satisfying; even those that are nearly free like Google Docs. Google Docs can’t always deliver what you want. I use PiratePad.net for real time collaboration that just needs text and to capture comments (this came from the same people who were acquired by Google). Sometimes, all you need is one or two functions, as I said earlier.

A few years ago I tried an experiment, and loaded all my content to my Google Docs account and saw how long I could last without using Word or any other Office program. I think I lasted maybe a week, probably less. Then I thought: what was the point? Office was fine for my needs. I mean, I am not going back to pen and paper. Or a paper ledger book.

Of course, we have progressed. Now I see people at meetings composing on smartphone keyboards. Good for them. Or typing on glass, on tablets. Or even sillier: using a keyboard with their tablets. I have tried these and they aren’t for me. But that is just me.

But seriously Eric, you really want people to retire Office and move to using a combination of Box and Yammer? Much as I love Box and Yammer, I don’t see this as a viable option.

As I am writing this article (in Word, of course), I recall the many word processors that I have used over my career:

In the late 1970s when I was in grad school, I used DEC VAX and LaTEX and the predecessors to vi and other text editors that are still used today in the command-line world. This was on time sharing character-mode terminals. In my first jobs, we used dedicated word processing machines, such as the Xerox, Wang and NBI. They had screens and impact line printers and cost a bundle. But they were a real boon for those of us who learned how to compose on the keyboard. Now you say those words and people look at you funny: how else are you going to write something? Oh, you mean with a pen and a piece of paper? How retro!

Then came the PC and the first DOS based tools in the early 1980s. Wordstar was one of the first. Then I worked in an insurance company where we gave everyone Multimate, which was popular because it mimicked the Wang word processing command structure. When I started at PC Week, everyone there used Xywrite and for many years in publishing I used that one. It was popular because again it mimicked the command structure of another minicomputer text processing system called Atex. Then came Word, and the rest of Office, and that was that. End of the need to try something else. The rest of the world adopted Office, and we are done evaluating anything else.

Do we see a trend here? Word processors have been user interface train wrecks, caused by the comfort and keyboard memories of forgotten office equipment. But we use them, and use them hard daily.

But retire Office? I don’t think so. Actually, Office has a lot of stuff in it. Many people couldn’t even name three other programs that are included in Office besides the big three. (Click on the Wikipedia link if you are curious.) Have you ever tried using Groove? Exactly my point.

So sorry, Office is for better or worse, here to stay on our hard drives. But let’s try to make those 100-slide verbose decks extinct, please.