From: Robin Stevens <rejs@astro.ox.ac.uk>
Newsgroups: alt.humor.best-of-usenet
Subject: [ox.talk] Re: Useful Information
Date: 13 Nov 1997 11:42:55 +0100

Subject: Re: Useful Information 
From: disgusted@ox.ac.uk (Colin Batchelor)
Newsgroups: ox.talk

[Submitter's Note: The post being followed up here contained a simple list
of the telephone numbers of all the Oxford colleges.]

Thomas Womack (microsoft-fan@ox.ac.uk) wrote:
: Available in more sensible format (Excel 97) as
: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~microsoft-fan/oxcoll.xls

You're winding us up now, aren't you. I mean, aren't you? HTF is Excel 97
a more useful format? Does it have built in touch-tone dialling or
something? 

Oh, no need to dial the number by phone, I'll just click on this nice 
spreadsheet supplied by Tom. What do you mean human beings don't 
understand Word 97 files broadcast over voice lines?

Or do we need to do spreadsheety things on 'phone numbers? Std. 
deviation? Median? Sum? Graph them against age of college / alphabetical 
position of college / Norrington Table position?

And if plaintext is such a crappy format, how come it was good enough 
for, say, Thomas Hardy, or Coventry Patmore, or Edmund Spenser?