Lotus Notes is a crime against humanity. In exhibit 001-M we see that Notes simply can’t meet even the simplest requirements of community.
Notes, like any business software, has a straightforward responsibility to at least attempt to play nicely with others. One of the more fundamental courtesies is to honor the formatting of common business software – or at least to try. Notes, however, is so pathologically anti-social that it features multiple distinct ways to completely ignore what you need.
To the right is a relatively simple form created in Word (click to enlarge). It features some basic border options, comfortable text spacing and some cosmetic coloring choices. Although tastes vary most would agree it’s a fairly attractive template.
You might assume that sending this to somebody – somebody unfortunate enough to also be using Notes – would be as easy as “copy-paste”. You would be wrong. Selecting this and pasting it into Notes results in this:
Notes understands that you have worked hard to create an attractive template. It considers your attempt with malicious contempt. You’ve made border choices for esthetic reasons. To hurt you emotionally it inflicts large, thick black borders – an option that nobody on this or any other Earth would ever choose willingly – on your innocent document. Negative space is both attractive and significantly reduces eyestrain. To hurt you physically it squashes all your text into as small an area as possible making it as fatiguing as possible to read.
So, simple pasting of the content ruins it. Notes also offers an “Import” option that, supposedly, provides a more advanced method for consuming content from other applications. It provides hope that you might be able to complete this inanely simple task with minimal suffering. Using the import option on the same Word file results in this:
Notes makes all the same mistakes for all the same reasons as it already did but rubs salt in the wound by additionally ignoring all of your font and font color choices as well. In this way, Notes creates hope by providing a supposedly more capable, advanced feature to meet your completely reasonable, totally pedestrian need. Once it allows your hope to bloom by offering the feature, Notes crushes it, as it always does, by making the feature even worse than you could have imagined.
It’s psychological warfare pure and simple.
