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Software designers
Sep. 3rd, 2011 11:34 pmThere is a special place reserved in my hell for software designers who just don't get it.
I've used mail merge in MS Office for years to perform some tasks that involve custom printing of forms that are not actually letters or mailing labels. It's the only task I continued to use Microsoft Word for, because it worked in Microsoft Word but not in anyone else's software. OpenOffice, Ami-Pro, and other vendors "dumbed down" the mail merge task so that it wouldn't do what I wanted.
It now appears that Microsoft has also ruined this feature, making it either impossible or infinitely difficult to perform simple tasks that are not form letters or mailing labels. It worked fine in Office 2000, but fails in versions since then.
Worse, the documentation in both MS Office and OpenOffice only covers the "wizard" approach which is so lame it can't do much of anything. This, in my opinion, is like building cars that have no reverse gear because most people have trouble steering backwards.
I've used mail merge in MS Office for years to perform some tasks that involve custom printing of forms that are not actually letters or mailing labels. It's the only task I continued to use Microsoft Word for, because it worked in Microsoft Word but not in anyone else's software. OpenOffice, Ami-Pro, and other vendors "dumbed down" the mail merge task so that it wouldn't do what I wanted.
It now appears that Microsoft has also ruined this feature, making it either impossible or infinitely difficult to perform simple tasks that are not form letters or mailing labels. It worked fine in Office 2000, but fails in versions since then.
Worse, the documentation in both MS Office and OpenOffice only covers the "wizard" approach which is so lame it can't do much of anything. This, in my opinion, is like building cars that have no reverse gear because most people have trouble steering backwards.
