Some people seem to enjoy the challenge involved in using products for a purpose that they were expressly not designed for. For example, people who use a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Or people who use nutcrackers to knock down a wall. Or people who use a top of the range high power personal computer as a pocket calculator.

Anyway, I know how they feel because today I have been using Microsoft Excel (Excel! Hah!) as something to produce graphs with. Which leads you to all kinds of questions, like who on earth is responsible for choosing the default colour scheme that the graphs come in when you make them? On what computer system, or printer, or anything, do those colours look anything like a sensible and reasonable choice? They look like some child has been let loose with crayons to make the graph. Worse, they look like a CGA palette, or something. Yeah, I'm sure that it's been fixed to be something less awful in Excel Fireball 2005 or whatever, but I'm stuck with Excel '95 as the only quasi-legal version that I have available to me, and it means that for every graph I make I have to spend about five minutes clicking on semi-visible icons in order to make it look like anything that I could seriously use.

Yeuch. I should just give up and figure out how to use gnuplot or something.