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Best Error Message Ever…

By Brian | May 8, 2009 | Share on Facebook

Trying to open an Microsoft Excel spreadsheet at work, and got this error message:

Non-technical user’s interpretation: There’s been an error. The error is so complicated, that merely explaining it to you would take too long. Seriously, trust me, you don’t want to know.

Actual explanation: The file’s name was very long, and it was downloaded from the web into a folder that was many layers deep in it’s hierarchical tree. The resulting file name (including the full path) exceeded the maximum filename length, causing a DDE error. ALSO, the error message describing the DDE error is designed to include the file name, and the resulting error message exceeded the maximum error message length, hence the above message.

On the upside, the error message’s advice (rename the file or put it in a different folder) is good advice, and actually did solve the problem.

On the downside, DAMN, what an awful error message. If Hodgman and Long ever saw this, it’d be a Mac ad in no time…

Topics: Tech Talk | 4 Comments »

4 Responses to “Best Error Message Ever…”

  1. Konstantin says at May 8th, 2009 at 7:47 pm :
    Awesome!

  2. Jeff Porten says at May 10th, 2009 at 9:22 pm :
    Um, wow. That’s jawdropping. What’s even more jawdropping is that someone decided to write code catching a thrown error that’s too big for the dialog box, rather than increasing the buffer for the dialog box.

    Curious to know how long an error has to be before it’s too big?

    FWIW, as a Mac programmer I can vouch that error dialogs here can easily scroll off the screen, at which point the problem is that the dialog box won’t auto-widen or provide a scroll bar. But I’d still call this preferable behavior to what you’ve got there….

  3. Brian says at May 12th, 2009 at 9:58 am :
    I should mention for completeness’ sake that the spreadsheet was being opened through MS SharePoint, which has a tendency to auto-create impossibly long path names for it’s files, so I’m guessing that’s how the problem arose.

    I have no idea how long the error gets before this kind of error handling kicks in. I can tell you that dialog boxes in Windows don’t ever seem to reach full-screen size (at least not in retail software – I’ve seen some developers create some doozy’s in the office).

    The ironies here are that a) we’ve found the situation where Windows is shielding the user from tons of detail to make the message more friendly and Mac is drowning the user in detail – quite the opposite of how things used to be, and b) neither company has figured out a way to put a hyperlink to the details in the error box for those who want to know more…

  4. Jeff Porten says at May 26th, 2009 at 3:22 pm :
    Error messages are in that gray area between user interface and designer interface, so I can understand some UI schizophrenia here. Notably, the only time I’ve ever gotten an error message to scroll offscreen is when I’m programming, so that’s somewhere I’ll forgive Mac.

    But keep in mind that I started my Mac career having to learn what Error Code -15 was; you won’t catch me saying that Macs are perfect here. I dislike your idea of a hyperlink — that’s seriously breaking the paradigm of “what to do when faced with an error box” — but a third button linking to details would provide the same benefit without changing the UI.