Factuplus 2006

Factuplus 2006 is the worst piece of software i have ever seen in my entire life. Really. Seeing a popular in Portugal program in a year 2007 which has a look and feel of a 1989-1993 program makes you feel – “i want my money back”. Paying 180 euros for such a shameful software makes me feel guilty; next time i will definitely chose a different software.

During Factuplus 2006 installation, you notice, that you cannot switch to any other task in windows, and while windows is meant to be a multi-tasking operating system, it annoys hell out of me, when something is blocking my access to other software. The dialogs that Factuplus 2006 installation is using are from Windows 3.11 and i am not kidding and not exaggerating it, thanks God that software itself is using Windows 95 dialogs. =O) The activation procedure is annoying as well as one has to register twice on the Sage’s site, besides that when you call them for the first time to get the activation code, they redirect you to the register procedure, asking to call them about 30 minutes later after that.

Factuplus was made to be a difficult program, so the users would contact the Sage, who made it, asking for a course to learn it. Few days after buying this program i was contacted by the Sage representative asking me if i would be interested in visiting a course – i said no, cause in no way they are going to get one more cent from me, as long as they are selling me last century’s software.

Factuplus is a software, which is made against all rules of usability and accessibility, take a look at the menu bar of Factuplus 2006, and guess which icon serves for what:

I can tell you, that someone using this software for a lot of years still have to wait for tooltips to be reach the content he needs.

Lets take a look at the Factuplus about window:

If you are not an advanced user, you might get afraid viewing, that your system still has MsDos 7.0, or your RAM is 1.024 kBytes, when it is in fact is about 2GB which is about 2.048 000 kBytes, if you please =O) The colors are ********* – for what it stands i do not know, i think that the authors of Factuplus may have no idea about it as well. The funniest thing is that i still have a 80386 processor and that a math co-processor was not installed. I should call AMD and ask for my money back, my Athlon 3500+ is actually a 386 processor with no co-processor … hahahaha =O) The fact that i have only 1 task executing in all 7 windows that i have open and a couple of tasks like Apache, MySQL, MsSQL etc are running is a dirty lie, 80386 has no multi-tasking =)

I will just list some of the hundreds usability problems that Factuplus has: you can’t open the same child window twice and you get a nasty message box advising you about it; you can’t open a different child window – the same annoying message box will tell you that; once you get into a combobox, which is required, you can’t get out as long as you don’t select something, that Factuplus wishes, and once again you will receive a message about it; when you pass over, an item at the main menu, the icon of the active item will become an additional checkbox, which is visibly overlaying the icon, but will annoy you much, you can see an example below; you cant double click on an item to change its options, you have to select it from the left window list option panel; window’s titles are less then descriptive, while changing something Factuplus will give you a title for this window like “changing”; and hundreds and thousands more ….

Final verdict – take you hands of this program and find something else, anything else will be better then this.