Saturday, May 16, 2015

Computer FixIts

A friend sent me a document to address for the mission.

OK, I've cleaned it up some more, but the authors are incredibly incompetent when it comes to word processors. It is so easy to do it all automatically if you know how and I'm more than willing to show how.

They have spent a hideous amount of time that I have now removed on tappity-tappity brute force "formatting": centering, date formatting, sequencing, you name it. Tappity, tappity, tappity.

I'll guarantee that if we find ourselves doing a particular thing over and over again, we need to STOP, because someone has already figured out how to automate that. In particular, text formatting is down to a science: centering vertically or horizontally, merging cells, formatting dates into whatever you want (Weekday, month, day, year) are available at the click of a button for a host of formats, including Jewish (Tevet).

So please tell your colleagues: If they find themselves doing something repetitively in a spreadsheet or Word document (or, really, anywhere else) we can assure them that there is an easier way.

Just email me. Although I'll probably post the answer here and email them back with the URL. They don't have to pay for it but it increases my SEO visibility.

People in general, and organizations in particular, need to make the investment to teach people how to use these tools that have been given them.

Hideous amounts of time are unnecessarily being wasted.

I came to a brick wall at the rubric: I've fixed the rest, but they had PASTED THE RUBRIC AS AN IMAGE!!! So there is absolutely no way to edit it.

Ask them for a source for from where they got it. It is probably in an Excel spreadsheet format with which we can do something. But we can't edit an image, at least not with a huge amount of more time.

Otherwise it means rebuilding it from scratch, too late tonight to do that.

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I learned this forty decades ago, if you don't know what you're doing, ask (and if necessary pay) an expert. That goes for plumbers, chimney sweeps, gardeners, fixit guys, lawyers,

and computer people.

Do NOT try to do it yourself.

That way everybody wins.

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Sigh.

:-(

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