Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2013-05-18 12:30 am
azurelunatic) wrote2013-05-18 12:30 am
Entry tags:
Flipping Tables
Today was a day, all right. It is coming up on the time of an event, and for various reasons it was necessary to make personalized printed-out items. And this, my lovelies, meant -- the mail merge.
Today was not a good day for me vs. the mail merge. First I couldn't get anything to print right. One reboot and two printers later, it turned out that the problem was that the template for the labels was encroaching on the printer's idea of a suitable margin, and worried Word wanted me to make sure that was okay.
IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A LOT MORE OKAY IF YOU'D HAVE TOLD ME THAT TWO HOURS EARLIER, FFS. (To be fair, one hour of those somewhat-less-than-two was a meeting.)
But we got past that. And the confused poking at the Macbook where I managed to stumble myself into a server I couldn't authenticate to (following directions the hard way to install something we have a sitewide license for -- that was already installed, and I didn't recognize the icon and the print was hella small, and it wasn't pinned to the dock) and -- you know how sometimes the person who can't even computer has got themselves halfway up a tree and you look at them and go "... you're clearly incompetent, so ... the fuck did you *get* up there?" Yeah. That was me. I'm much more at home on a Windows box.
And back on home ground with Windows... The thing with mail merges is that they're often because you're trying to print *onto* something, and that something is possibly some sort of FIDDLY STUPID SHEET OF LABELS or some other custom stationery product with a number and a dodgy template that forces a table with possibly inadequate padding into service as an agent of placement.
Now your standard sheet of labels, or cards, usually has landscape-oriented little strips, and the orientation of the sheet is generally portrait. But sometimes you don't want a landscape-oriented strip. Sometimes, you want it portrait-oriented.
I am not on my own in my department. Far from it. When yesterday I asked for one of the folks what makes pretty things to make me a pretty thing on short notice (and I really need to make with the chocolate in that designer's direction, because damn), that pretty thing was *made*. I take credit for the part where I very clearly explained what I wanted: the size, the orientation, and the thing where past-self was really helpful and linked to the Office Depot page where we'd ordered it, so the designer could see the specs and download the template. And with that unambiguous information, the designer got shit *done*.
"I made the template, but could you do the mail merge, [Azz]?" the designer asked. (The designer apparently hadn't heard of mail merges until I blithely mentioned them in the request.) Since I was planning for that anyway, I said I'd be delighted to. "Don't worry, I won't fuck up your aspect ratios," I reassured her.
The little strips needed to be portrait-oriented. Portrait-oriented strips on a portrait-oriented template, with text, means shit's sideways.
It turns out that when you try to faithfully replace the example text in the sideways-oriented text boxes that your designer has left you with mail merge fields, the bastard doesn't want to apply itself to the other labels. Nor does it want to print different things on the same page. Nor does it want to let you insert a command statement inside the text box. And rotating the orientation of the cell was Not Very Helpful, and didn't apply to the other cells.
I wish I could say at this point that I said "flipping tables!" but alas, those of my co-workers in range to hear what I was muttering were hearing more "motherfucking" and fewer of the words that I use when I'm pussyfooting around about my feelings. (There basically weren't any, which is why I was more vigorously voicing my opinions.)
Furthermore, it turns out that when you try to put text on top of an image that nearly fills up a cell in a table, the image likes to jump over into nearby cells. Or not so nearby cells.
Google demonstrated to me that I was not alone in this problem. Thus fortified, I huffed off to chat with the #cupcake crew. I started to explain the problem, complete with frustrated "I'm ready to flip tables" comment, when I hauled up short.
"I'm not thinking about this like a programmer," I said. "Thanks for being my rubber ducky." I ducked back into Word. The problem was basically that Word did not like to handle sideways text. But what if the text wasn't sideways? Landscape orientation of the page would mean portrait orientation of the strips. A little tweaking later, and I had it.
Flipping tables. At work.
Today was not a good day for me vs. the mail merge. First I couldn't get anything to print right. One reboot and two printers later, it turned out that the problem was that the template for the labels was encroaching on the printer's idea of a suitable margin, and worried Word wanted me to make sure that was okay.
IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A LOT MORE OKAY IF YOU'D HAVE TOLD ME THAT TWO HOURS EARLIER, FFS. (To be fair, one hour of those somewhat-less-than-two was a meeting.)
But we got past that. And the confused poking at the Macbook where I managed to stumble myself into a server I couldn't authenticate to (following directions the hard way to install something we have a sitewide license for -- that was already installed, and I didn't recognize the icon and the print was hella small, and it wasn't pinned to the dock) and -- you know how sometimes the person who can't even computer has got themselves halfway up a tree and you look at them and go "... you're clearly incompetent, so ... the fuck did you *get* up there?" Yeah. That was me. I'm much more at home on a Windows box.
And back on home ground with Windows... The thing with mail merges is that they're often because you're trying to print *onto* something, and that something is possibly some sort of FIDDLY STUPID SHEET OF LABELS or some other custom stationery product with a number and a dodgy template that forces a table with possibly inadequate padding into service as an agent of placement.
Now your standard sheet of labels, or cards, usually has landscape-oriented little strips, and the orientation of the sheet is generally portrait. But sometimes you don't want a landscape-oriented strip. Sometimes, you want it portrait-oriented.
I am not on my own in my department. Far from it. When yesterday I asked for one of the folks what makes pretty things to make me a pretty thing on short notice (and I really need to make with the chocolate in that designer's direction, because damn), that pretty thing was *made*. I take credit for the part where I very clearly explained what I wanted: the size, the orientation, and the thing where past-self was really helpful and linked to the Office Depot page where we'd ordered it, so the designer could see the specs and download the template. And with that unambiguous information, the designer got shit *done*.
"I made the template, but could you do the mail merge, [Azz]?" the designer asked. (The designer apparently hadn't heard of mail merges until I blithely mentioned them in the request.) Since I was planning for that anyway, I said I'd be delighted to. "Don't worry, I won't fuck up your aspect ratios," I reassured her.
The little strips needed to be portrait-oriented. Portrait-oriented strips on a portrait-oriented template, with text, means shit's sideways.
It turns out that when you try to faithfully replace the example text in the sideways-oriented text boxes that your designer has left you with mail merge fields, the bastard doesn't want to apply itself to the other labels. Nor does it want to print different things on the same page. Nor does it want to let you insert a command statement inside the text box. And rotating the orientation of the cell was Not Very Helpful, and didn't apply to the other cells.
I wish I could say at this point that I said "flipping tables!" but alas, those of my co-workers in range to hear what I was muttering were hearing more "motherfucking" and fewer of the words that I use when I'm pussyfooting around about my feelings. (There basically weren't any, which is why I was more vigorously voicing my opinions.)
Furthermore, it turns out that when you try to put text on top of an image that nearly fills up a cell in a table, the image likes to jump over into nearby cells. Or not so nearby cells.
Google demonstrated to me that I was not alone in this problem. Thus fortified, I huffed off to chat with the #cupcake crew. I started to explain the problem, complete with frustrated "I'm ready to flip tables" comment, when I hauled up short.
"I'm not thinking about this like a programmer," I said. "Thanks for being my rubber ducky." I ducked back into Word. The problem was basically that Word did not like to handle sideways text. But what if the text wasn't sideways? Landscape orientation of the page would mean portrait orientation of the strips. A little tweaking later, and I had it.
Flipping tables. At work.
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TABLES FOR LAYOUT. AIN'T PRETTY.
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