I hate Microsoft Word...

[Dannyboy]

This document, though, is not subject to those strictures because of what it is.

In that case, I would suggest the large bottle of Excedrin.

Or maybe a big ol' bottle of scotch

[K Frame]

You have read my thoughts on scotch, correct?

Thought so...

[Harold Tuttle]

well, todays M$werd project is the label/nametag merge for the county's PTA art awards

i have a .xls file with the kids names and school

whomever set up the data this year has "first name last name" in one field

so i cannot sort it via last name

its only 256 nametags but...

maybe i could set it to break the data at the space between the names
except for the blended family kids like "Mary Sue Smith Jones"

screw it, i will alphabetically sort it by first name and they can find their nametags that way

sure i could manually order the fields, but i'm a volunteer thats gonna pay for the avery labels out of my pocket

M$werd does the project rather nicely

select the tabbed data, select the Avery sticker design,
typeset the template, merge, print

Miss Chandra-Sekar, your nametag awaits

[garrettwc]

Harold, you could take the field in Excel and do a "text to columns" function. Sort the names alphabetically first. Then do it in groups of similarly sized first names and set the break manually, then go to the next group of names and repeat. Shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes on only 256 names. Just make sure you have a blank column to the right for the last name to fall into.

[Harold Tuttle]

sweet
Ka Lin Lou
thanks you

i just have no idea where her name breaks

[garrettwc]

You're on your own with the asian names.

[Phantom Warrior]

I concur.  I hate a program that presumes to correct my "mistakes".

Nothing gets me to curse a blue streak like autoformatting.

YES.  I had to help reformat an opord the day I "was a lieutenant" that had been made with autoformatted lists.  Like all opords it was a giant, deeply nested outline.  And I had to reformat all the headings.  But every time I changed one heading it would renumber the rest of the list.  Instead of "1...2...3...4..." I was seeing "1...1...1...1..."  I had to continuously go back and consult the original.  So I was sitting there next to CPT Hady quietly cursing and muttering under my breath the whole time.

[BozemanMT]

You guys are bitter.
I write huge test plans and Word works fine
AS LONG AS YOU DON'T FOOL WITH IT.  (and ok, big table stotally blow)
you set up a couple simple styles and don't fool with it
you tell all the people that work for you to do the same thing.
works great.
quit thinking like an engineer and think like normal people.  I want the computer to help me do my job, not be my job.

[tyme]

AS LONG AS YOU DON'T FOOL WITH IT.

At that point, why not use Wordpad?

For anything more serious than email (for which I use Vim, thanks very much), I'm trying to get in the habit of using various TeX macro sets.

[K Frame]

"quit thinking like an engineer..."

Gee, if I were an engineer, maybe I'd think like one.

But I'm a person who has made my living using word processing programs for almost 20 years now as a writer/editor. I've used more than my fair share of word processing programs -- Word Star, Leading Edge, Samna, Word Perfect starting with version 3.5, and Word, starting with Word 95. If I had to choose, I'd probably pick Samna or Word Star over Word.

I don't need an engineer to tell me that Word was developed by computer geeks who didn't pay one whit of attention to the requirements of people who actually use this program on a daily basis, but who don't think in terms of visual basic coding structures.

The only reason why Word became the preeminent word processing program is because of software bundling and better compatability with Windows.

"I write huge test plans and Word works fine AS LONG AS YOU DON'T FOOL WITH IT."

That's a Lovely concept, but as I've described in SEVERAL of my messages, not feasible in my environment where document have to pass through multiple revision cycles by multiple people over a period of time, and all of it has to be built on a style sheet that is CUSTOMER MANDATED.

[Standing Wolf]

I wouldn't even consider using Word if my page lay-out program didn't require it. Word is the classic example of everything that's wrong with software.