I had a job when I was in HS working in an office of a importer and exporter of cigars and the guy who ran the company thought I was a computer genius with rare super powers because I knew how to set up a mail merge in word and excel to make his invoic...
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@futurebird what's a mail merge?
Let's say you have a spreadsheet with names and addresses and billing amounts for a bunch of people and you want personalized letters for each one with their names and the price printed nice and pretty mixed in with other text.
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It was a fun job. Although my boss was always smoking and had a lot of shady "friends."
He was always yelling "Where is that computer girl?"
Because I'd get whatever he wanted done and go back in the stock room and read for hours.
@futurebird my Dad made a whole career out of it, combined with the business sense to make effective use of it. Of course, part of that career involved writing a bespoke system for it in Access
(but hey, if it works…) -
@futurebird my Dad made a whole career out of it, combined with the business sense to make effective use of it. Of course, part of that career involved writing a bespoke system for it in Access
(but hey, if it works…)@futurebird which is how I learned how cursed it is to try and talk to anything speaking HTTP from inside of VBA
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Let's say you have a spreadsheet with names and addresses and billing amounts for a bunch of people and you want personalized letters for each one with their names and the price printed nice and pretty mixed in with other text.
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Let's say you have a spreadsheet with names and addresses and billing amounts for a bunch of people and you want personalized letters for each one with their names and the price printed nice and pretty mixed in with other text.
@futurebird @alter_kaker
I literally learned how to do this as an assignment in middle school. But that was in claris works and I've never tried it again
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It's 2026. No one can figure out how to do a mail merge.
@futurebird I literally had to write a mail merge application in Python last year because we use the Microsoft suite at work and the built in mail merge functionality has not changed or improved since I first used it in 1996. -
@futurebird @alter_kaker
I literally learned how to do this as an assignment in middle school. But that was in claris works and I've never tried it again@RnDanger @futurebird @alter_kaker we also learned this in middle school with MS Word and MS Access. It was fun
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@futurebird which is how I learned how cursed it is to try and talk to anything speaking HTTP from inside of VBA
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Career advice: learn to do a mail merge and find someone who will be dependent on you for life.
The end.
@futurebird that's pretty interesting - suggests that what impresses people is less the technical difficulty, vs being able to viscerally feel how much drudgery you saved em. an important lesson for computer touching, I think.
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@tkinias @futurebird it wasn't much fun to write, but very cool what kind of impact it was able to have once it did work reliably, when hooked up to all the rest of the reporting-and-mass-action smarts.
VBAEZTexting/SendSMS.bas at 9a47e06f4e67dbdfef6cd3fa5f2f2f3762406e03 · SnoopJ/VBAEZTexting
Using the EZTexting Legacy API to send an SMS from VBA (Microsoft Access) - VBAEZTexting/SendSMS.bas at 9a47e06f4e67dbdfef6cd3fa5f2f2f3762406e03 · SnoopJ/VBAEZTexting
GitHub (github.com)
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I had a job when I was in HS working in an office of a importer and exporter of cigars and the guy who ran the company thought I was a computer genius with rare super powers because I knew how to set up a mail merge in word and excel to make his invoices and letters for his customers.
It was a little tricky back then. But really just read the directions and follow them. I thought "some day computers will be so easy to use everyone will be able to do this"
Yeah. That didn't happen.
@futurebird And yet we *all* use them now. I'm regularly blown away by how little most users actually know about anything at all.
I assumed email is something an office worker just has to know, like using a stapler or copy machine, but I know now I'm very wrong. Most people couldn't tell you the difference between a To, a CC or a BCC. They are totally mystified when they Reply-All and get replies from anybody else on the list of recipients.
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It's 2026. No one can figure out how to do a mail merge.
@futurebird I use them all the time. I get why people avoid them. What I don't get are the people who need a typist. And I only slightly understand people who need someone to properly format their docs.
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I had a job when I was in HS working in an office of a importer and exporter of cigars and the guy who ran the company thought I was a computer genius with rare super powers because I knew how to set up a mail merge in word and excel to make his invoices and letters for his customers.
It was a little tricky back then. But really just read the directions and follow them. I thought "some day computers will be so easy to use everyone will be able to do this"
Yeah. That didn't happen.
@futurebird I have to relearn how to do this every year for Christmas cards.
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Career advice: learn to do a mail merge and find someone who will be dependent on you for life.
The end.
@futurebird can confirm, I leveraged this and other Ancient Sorcery like “hella nested excel formulae” for raises at several jobs.
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It was a fun job. Although my boss was always smoking and had a lot of shady "friends."
He was always yelling "Where is that computer girl?"
Because I'd get whatever he wanted done and go back in the stock room and read for hours.
@futurebird one of my favorite jobs was doing data entry for a chimneysweep! there are so many people in tech who agonize about getting a job at google or whatever and don't realize that there are so many rewarding jobs supporting other fields that they've never thought of
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@futurebird bicycle for the mind, but it's one of those weird bicycles that someone drew from memory
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It's 2026. No one can figure out how to do a mail merge.
@futurebird Wow. And I do it with Libre office!!
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I had a job when I was in HS working in an office of a importer and exporter of cigars and the guy who ran the company thought I was a computer genius with rare super powers because I knew how to set up a mail merge in word and excel to make his invoices and letters for his customers.
It was a little tricky back then. But really just read the directions and follow them. I thought "some day computers will be so easy to use everyone will be able to do this"
Yeah. That didn't happen.
@futurebird those lucky bastards in the universe where HyperCard caught on…
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@futurebird oh, that makes sense
@alter_kaker @futurebird my favorite example is an Australian [CORRECTION: UK] bank that wanted to do a campaign addressing their top 200 [CORRECTION: 2000] high-net-worth customers. Due to inattention to correct placeholder replacement, two hundred letters went out each beginning with the same salutation “Dear Rich Bastard”…
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@alter_kaker @futurebird my favorite example is an Australian [CORRECTION: UK] bank that wanted to do a campaign addressing their top 200 [CORRECTION: 2000] high-net-worth customers. Due to inattention to correct placeholder replacement, two hundred letters went out each beginning with the same salutation “Dear Rich Bastard”…
@Unixbigot @alter_kaker @futurebird lol >The little UK firm responsible for the gaffe received a complaint from a potential customer who felt himself qualified to be a rich bastard yet had not received the letter he deemed appropriate to his station in life.
from https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dear-rich-bastard/
