KnowledgeBase Mausoleum

Mike Wolfe -

TL;DR: Click the link below to search for retired Microsoft Knowledgebase articles no longer hosted on microsoft.com.

Microsoft Access has been around a looong time.  It's also maintained strong backwards compatibility.  As a result, there are some great articles written more than a decade ago that are still relevant today.  Some of those great articles are Microsoft KnowledgeBase articles.  

But nothing is more frustrating than chasing down some obscure bug, finding a link to a KnowledgeBase article with the promised solution, clicking on the link to said article and seeing a 404 error instead.  This xkcd comic captures my emotions splendidly:

There's an xkcd comic for everything.

Microsoft KnowledgeBase Graveyard

I had this exact experience again today.  In researching an article I was writing, I came across this page at Microsoft: Excel COM add-ins and Automation add-ins.  At the bottom of the article, the following text appears:

For more information about Automation Add-Ins, see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

285337 HOWTO: Create a Visual Basic Automation Add-in for Excel Worksheet Functions

Yes! That's the exact information I am looking for.  C'mon internet, take me to that article!

But when I clicked that link, I was greeted with this unpleasant surprise:

Why Microsoft? Why would you spend so much time and money developing documentation and then just...throw it away?

After several seconds of shaking my monitor like an angry stick figure, I googled microsoft knowledgebase 285337.  

Aside: I write "googled" with a lower-case "G" as I'm using it to mean a generic web search.  I actually used DuckDuckGo for my search.  One might say I "DuckDuckGo'ed" or, perhaps, I "DuckDuckWent."  Either way, I DuckDuckCelebrated when I saw the results:

It's alive! It's aliiiive!

Sure enough, when I clicked on the above link, it took me right to that glorious KB content I yearned for ... actually, it took me to the wrong KB article (note in the above screenshot that the KB number in the search bar and the link are mismatched).  However, I was able to search on my KB number from within the PKI Solutions site and that did take me where I wanted to go:

I found you! I thought I had lost you forever!

Mausoleum of Knowledge

"A mausoleum is an external free-standing building constructed as a monument enclosing the interment space or burial chamber of a deceased person or people." -Wikipedia

Mausoleums are half-monument, half-burial chamber.  I like the metaphor for a website dedicated to lovingly keeping alive the memory of the vast Microsoft KnowledgeBase archive.  

I've never heard of PKI Solutions before, but I'm sure glad they took on this project.

Microsoft KB Archive Search

Image by krissybdesigns from Pixabay