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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@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 A friend of mine has been a professional database wizard for a couple of decades now. He has taught some corporate and conference classes. He gave a presentation like that once with a test database he had set up. For a company he had called "United Consumer Fuckers."
Actually mailing stuff out like that is obviously better, though.
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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”…
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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 both humanity and computers are stupid, imo
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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 @noondlyt I do mail merge activities exactly once per year: Christmas holiday cards.
I have to relearn how to do mail merge exactly once per year: see above.
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@futurebird I setup the mail merge for my mom's small business on an Apple][ clone when I was an early teen.
2nd year college, I'm telling her I'm taking "Database Fundamentals" class and she asks why I have to take that. Asserts I already know the fundamentals.
I respond, "This is like, fundamentals of the American Airlines reservation database".@PizzaDemon When it works it works. Did you see the one about the airline reservation database that ran on Windows 95 in 2024? https://techstory.in/32-year-old-windows-version-saved-southwest-airlines-from-the-global-it-outage/
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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 I literally taught a coworker how to do mail merge last week. She told her manager and my manager that I was her hero that day! The kudos felt good, but I marveled that nobody else in the office knew how to do it, or even that it existed.
She was going to write the email and send it to 250 people at a time, to get it to a few thousand recipients. And when one address is incorrect, manually find the wrong address and re send the email.
I think I saved her a good half days' worth of tedium. -
It's 2026. No one can figure out how to do a mail merge.
@futurebird I knew how to do a mail merge in the late ‘90s. I tried it in 2018 and none of the flows that used to work still did.
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It's 2026. No one can figure out how to do a mail merge.
@futurebird can confirm, but salesforce is making bank
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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 I didn't know that this functionality existed in Office. Thank you.
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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.
I am so honest with people when they try to complement my "tech skills" as an IT guy. I always tell them something like "Dude I just googled it." Because I know there's absolutely no risk to my job security by being honest about this.
I have absolutely no fear of AI taking my job because it still requires an end user to 1) Have reading comprehension and 2) Not be scared of computers.
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@futurebird I literally taught a coworker how to do mail merge last week. She told her manager and my manager that I was her hero that day! The kudos felt good, but I marveled that nobody else in the office knew how to do it, or even that it existed.
She was going to write the email and send it to 250 people at a time, to get it to a few thousand recipients. And when one address is incorrect, manually find the wrong address and re send the email.
I think I saved her a good half days' worth of tedium.the lack of knowledge... the gap between what people use of various tech, and what the tech actually could do for them alone is a perfect reason to stop making new tech.
invest the time and money into onboarding people.
SO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY WASTED
warm regards, someone who gave up on working as a UX engineer because of above sitch.
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the lack of knowledge... the gap between what people use of various tech, and what the tech actually could do for them alone is a perfect reason to stop making new tech.
invest the time and money into onboarding people.
SO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY WASTED
warm regards, someone who gave up on working as a UX engineer because of above sitch.
@plantfeest @Jirikiha @futurebird selling new tech without their customers' understanding of what th is tech does is where the profits are, so I'm pretty sure that Silicon Valley are going to be taking a hard pass on this advice
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@futurebird I blame the ridiculous learning curve and hollowing out of features imposed on us by Microsoft. What say you?
I can't blame microsoft when google docs is just as bad.
You need to use their "apps script" to do a mail merge OR install one of the add-ons made by third parties which means giving up a LOT of privacy to ... someone.
I wrote some app script to avoid exposing my students grades and names to ... just anyone.
To me mail merge is an obvious core feature of "office software" So why is it still so obscure and hard to do? Where is the "progress?"
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I can't blame microsoft when google docs is just as bad.
You need to use their "apps script" to do a mail merge OR install one of the add-ons made by third parties which means giving up a LOT of privacy to ... someone.
I wrote some app script to avoid exposing my students grades and names to ... just anyone.
To me mail merge is an obvious core feature of "office software" So why is it still so obscure and hard to do? Where is the "progress?"
Most people will give in and install an add-on to do this kind of operation. And it will probably be fine. However, I can see a manager saying "you see? this is why we need to keep our Microsoft licenses. It keeps us safe."
Making these kinds of operations easy for a broad user base is non-trivial. But it's also the kind of real software design work that just isn't "important" for some reason. No. It's more important to have an AI chatbot elbowing in on my workflow for no reason.
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Most people will give in and install an add-on to do this kind of operation. And it will probably be fine. However, I can see a manager saying "you see? this is why we need to keep our Microsoft licenses. It keeps us safe."
Making these kinds of operations easy for a broad user base is non-trivial. But it's also the kind of real software design work that just isn't "important" for some reason. No. It's more important to have an AI chatbot elbowing in on my workflow for no reason.
I desperately want to be impressed by software design. Even for just a moment once again in my life.
I want to think "wow computers are a great idea that save me time and solve problems"
The other teachers who were doing a similar task to me, just decided to write out their documents by hand, it was faster. I could save time by writing a script but they can't do it on their own.
The inefficiency of it all tortures my soul! Even as I understand why it exists.
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I can't blame microsoft when google docs is just as bad.
You need to use their "apps script" to do a mail merge OR install one of the add-ons made by third parties which means giving up a LOT of privacy to ... someone.
I wrote some app script to avoid exposing my students grades and names to ... just anyone.
To me mail merge is an obvious core feature of "office software" So why is it still so obscure and hard to do? Where is the "progress?"
@futurebird @aeveltstra I agree that this ought to be considered a core feature, but that unfortunately is the myth of progress at work.
Realistically speaking if a use case is sufficiently obscure that someone would expect to need to do an internet search to figure out how to do it/remind themselves how they did it last time, then that use case will never be considered core to the product by the product managers, and it will be lost in one or another rearchitecture. (In this case it was not lost, but explicitly moved to a plugin, away from the "core" feature set of Google Docs.)
But the social dynamic at play feels like a physical force in the development of software, once you know it well enough to recognize it.
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It's 2026. No one can figure out how to do a mail merge.
"I guess I'd just have had to do a mail merge."
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@futurebird @aeveltstra I agree that this ought to be considered a core feature, but that unfortunately is the myth of progress at work.
Realistically speaking if a use case is sufficiently obscure that someone would expect to need to do an internet search to figure out how to do it/remind themselves how they did it last time, then that use case will never be considered core to the product by the product managers, and it will be lost in one or another rearchitecture. (In this case it was not lost, but explicitly moved to a plugin, away from the "core" feature set of Google Docs.)
But the social dynamic at play feels like a physical force in the development of software, once you know it well enough to recognize it.
Totally agree. Software tries to get new users with flashy features, but then keeps them by making them scared of change.
How many little companies pay thousands and thousands for microsoft just because of some feature like mail merge that hasn't gotten any better in decades?
How many do the same with google?
What I really love is how documentation just doesn't exist anymore. The "help" menu in programs is mostly useless. "Go search reddit and stack overflow"
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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.
Libre office has a pretty good mail merge wizard nowadays ( is that a real word).
If your recipient names and addresses are in a spreadsheet, you type up the form letter.
Call the wizard from inside the form letter, choose the spreadsheet, and drag and drop the cells you want from the spreadsheet into where you want them in the document.
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Totally agree. Software tries to get new users with flashy features, but then keeps them by making them scared of change.
How many little companies pay thousands and thousands for microsoft just because of some feature like mail merge that hasn't gotten any better in decades?
How many do the same with google?
What I really love is how documentation just doesn't exist anymore. The "help" menu in programs is mostly useless. "Go search reddit and stack overflow"
Yeah re: help functions maybe the more general Unified Law of Software is something like: Features are Constituted by the Expectations User Have of Them, i.e. if no one expects something to work then it never will. The only way things get fixed is if the product manager's mental model of their user is a person who would care about something being broken. One of many ways in which agile has deeply broken our expectations of the world.
