To tell the whole truth, I didn’t even know what a “mail merge” was until last week…

My fiancée and I were preparing to mail out the invitations to our wedding. One step involves taking our spreadsheet of addresses and making labels out of them. She said “I’ll send over the spreadsheet for you to do a mail merge” and with furrowed brow I asked “What’s a mail merge?” Uh oh, I got that stare, not good. She replied “You don’t KNOW HOW to do a MAIL MERGE?”

You see, being a network engineer it’s generally assumed I know how to do everything that can be done on a computer. Myth. Matt, please don’t fire me.

So anyway, I said “Uh, okay, well can you just tell me the basic idea real quick? I’ll figure it out.”

What I really wanted to say was "You don’t KNOW HOW to BUILD A LINUX WEB SERVER?" but I refrained.

She tells me it’s just a wizard from the tools menu, really easy to do and walks you through every step. A wizard! I can handle it with a wizard! So I open Excel… uh oh, there’s that look again – “You do it in Word.” Crap. So I open Word and – no Tools menu – Office 2007 doesn’t use menus anymore. Everything is tabbed. I start clicking around to try and find the mail merge wizard. After three minutes of looking I discover it’s on the “Mailings” tab. Yea that one is my fault.

There it is, a nice big button “Start Mail Merge” with a “Labels” sub menu. Success! Uh not so much the success when our Avery label style isn’t listed. No big deal, I had the specs so I created a custom label size. Click OK and… nothing? The wizard went away and I have a blank piece of paper. “Honey, you said this is a step-by-step wizard, right?” She walks over “Yea, in Word 2000 on my computer it’s just a step by step wizard.” Then looks at my PC and says “Ah crap, I forgot you have Vista. I hate Vista.” I correct “It’s Office 2007 you hate, not Vista.” but then make a mental note that regular people don’t discern the difference…

So she sits down with me, we hunt-and-peck around, discovering that in order to continue the “wizard” you have to click another button, which at the end results in another arbitrary drop to the piece of paper that now contains some meaningless characters but nothing that resembles labels. Oh I see, another button next to that one. click None of this process is intuitive, nor is it wizard-easy, and it certainly wasn’t successful because after about 10 minutes of fooling with it she gives up and said “You know, I would have been done five minutes ago if I had just done it myself on my computer.”

Massive Office 2007 failure.

She was right. The mail merge wizard in Word 2000 (through 2003) was a heck of a lot better. She opened it, selected the correct Avery style (note: my seven year newer product has less styles available), a few clicks and a bit of format tweaking later we had labels. “That’s it?” I said. Yea, that was it. A wizard that worked, was as intuitive as you get with a Microsoft product, and most importantly it was easy – complete with Mr. Paperclip doing his best to make sure you don’t get stuck.

I’m sure in a Redmond board room it was decided that Office 2007 will be easier to use than previous versions, perhaps after everyone goes to an updated MOS training class. But what it will actually do, at least with my fiancée, is drive her to either never upgrade or more likely switch to a people-friendly platform like a Mac. A Mac. In my house. I can’t say I blame her and the experience will be typical for most people.

An argument I’ve used a lot in our Internet Explorer versus web standards discussions here is, if more than 80% of the world is using Internet Explorer, then why shouldn’t it be the defacto standard? Why should the minority force IE users (and Microsoft) to conform to the “written standard” when it’s really only the standard on paper and not in actual production?

This same argument applies here. Microsoft built a defacto standard in how people use Office products (on every platform) over the last decade. Now, in a seemingly fell-swoop, they’ve decided to change the way we use office products. I’ve been using Office 2007 for a year and I have not grown more familiar with the product. I hate the tabbed layout! HATE it! I know it’s supposed to be better organized and more user friendly, but it still feels completely alien and unnatural to me. Here are few other things that drive me crazy about Office 2007:

1. Saving documents as a different format and extension sucks. Surely there had to be a better way to cohesively switch to XML, I feel like I’m being forced to save in two different formats to make sure I (and everyone else) know they switched. I applied a registry hack so Office always saves in the old format.
2. Outlook is constantly “not being closed properly” and has to spend 15 minutes checking my mail files for consistency (and slowing to a crawl during).
3. About every month I have to run scanpst because my second mail file gets corrupted. I’ve made a habit of just running scanpst twice a month. Scanpst always finds errors in both files.
4. Outlook 2007 arbitrarily closes and reopens itself during the initial Send/Receive after first launch, but always after I’ve opened my other programs in the exact order I want to see them in my taskbar, forcing me to close everything to restore order…

It’s not all bad. Outlook finally supports more than one mail file for real (only about 10 years later than it should have). Excel can do over a million rows. Uh, you can choose color schemes for the interface. It looks like my Vista scheme. Sweet. No more Mr. Paperclip, we finally have a real help system that doesn’t work either. Wait, I’m supposed to be talking positives – indexing/search in Outlook actually does work and is pretty cool. When used with Vista it integrates into Windows Search and works very well.

That’s the story of when I finally gave up on trying to like Office 2007. My moment of wedding label Zen. Enjoy!