When we rolled LIDA out to the Beta Test Team about a week ago, I was expecting several of the testers to find a number of bugs I overlooked as I was rushing to get LIDA ready for beta test.
And indeed, they did find some, but not nearly as many as I was afraid they would.
What I did NOT expect, however, was the huge variety of hassles encountered with simply INSTALLING LIDA on various people’s systems.
Sure, LIDA only runs on Windows, and I’m pretty sure everyone is running Windows 10. But that seems to be where the commonality ends.
First there were the Bitness Hassles. These come into play if you have Microsoft Office installed, because it seems that MS has decided it does not want to allow 32-bit office applications to run on the same system as 64-bit applications.So we had to create both bitness flavors of LIDA to accommodate all our testers. See the article Getting LIDA Up and Running for more information on this.
Next comes the TYPE of Office installation you have. Personally, I prefer the stand-alone, install ’em on my computer versions, because I like to know I can still use them when I’m traveling and have no access to the internet. But there are versions that are web apps, meaning they run in a browser, and they require an internet connection, and just recently, I found out that there is a “Click-to-Run” version as well, and I currently don’t know if that’s the same as a web app or significantly different.One thing I DO know, however, is that LIDA won’t intrinsically run on the Click-to-Run versions of Office, and so if you have that, you need to install the Access Runtime.
Good grief.
And if that weren’t enough, we have now discovered that for a small percentage of users, trying to run LIDA (which is compiled) with any updated version of Access will throw another strange error about “Microsoft Access cannot open this file…” A good deal of time spent researching this error shows that there is a small number of computers who will refuse to run applications like LIDA, and no one has ever figured out why or how to fix it. The only workaround we have found – which we are just now testing with LIDA – is to install the 2013 version of the Access Runtime, and run LIDA through that.So it seems that the operation of LIDA is going great guns, with only a few minor bug fixes and some great improvement suggestions from the testers.
LIDA isn’t the hassle.
The true hassle is just INSTALLING the thing and getting it to run.
Who’d’a thunk it?
And even though it sounds like a copout, I lay the blame for all this hassle squarely at the feet of the big company that put all these roadblocks in place.
Oh, well.