Today I was working with Microsoft Project and I needed to renumber the tasks I had created. The ordering was all messed up. Surely, there had to be a way to do that, but I could not find it in the menus. Microsoft Project is a fairly clunky program that they initially bought, probably 15 or more years ago, and never made consistent with the rest of Office.

So I went to the help file and searched for the obvious: “renumber tasks.”

What I got back is the list above, a totally useless list of documents and help topics, none of which even remotely addressed my actual question. May I remind you, this was right inside Microsoft Project.

So I thought I’d try Google:

This  looked promising.  I typed “renumber tas” and it already knew what I wanted. I didn’t even have to tell it.

Then it gave me this list:

Note the first entry is actually an Ad – somebody else thinks Microsoft Project sucks and he built a business around it.

The very first non-advertisement entry seems to have my question answered. So I clicked:

Sure enough, here was my answer. It worked.

Within about 10 seconds of trying Google for an answer about a Microsoft product, I  was done and my list was sorted and renumbered.

Before spending 10 seconds on Google, though, I first looked for help in Microsoft Project, found it, typed my question, got a bewildering list of 20 possible candidates that I had to open and check  before I discarded them in frustration. I spent many fruitless minutes in Help before I gave up.

Google wins hands down.