Software designers

[altivo]

There 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.

Comments

[hrrunka]

Aye, it's strange the way smart but unusual features often seem to vanish along wih the next upgrade. I've found I've had to resort to custom perl scripts (or other such hackery) to do the kinds of things I'd have expected any sane data-merging application to be able to do...

[altivo]

I suspect either they don't know they broke it, because their testing covers only the obvious, or else they asked around and "nobody" used it, so they dropped it.

I finally managed to accomplish what I needed in OpenOffice this time, but in order to do so, I had to ignore all of their documentation and instructions and instead guess at how to make it work. It took a lot of guessing, and that's why I was so miffed.

Any number of tutorials exist for this, of course, but all of them assume you are dumb as a post and wet behind the ears as well, so they don't show anything more advanced than printing addresses on standardized Avery labels, or filling in the name and address on a form letter.

[hrrunka]

I had a fearful fight to make sense of OO's database and label-printing arrangement, involving several false starts. The system's plain hideous from a user's point of view...

[altivo]

Actually I found it much easier than MS Office back when it first started up. But of course in the ensuing years OOo has acquired all the same bloat that Microsoft has, and also that bad disease that comes of trying to "look just like" the competitor. Now both have nearly identical interfaces with all of the MS features I hate most transplanted into OOo.

[hrrunka]

Spot on. Gone is the lighter cleaner does-what-I-want program.