2007-12-04

Video Help

I need to do some simple stuff in Microsoft Word.
I need a document that has a letter on one side and a picture on the other.

How hard do you think this should be?
It should be typing some shit out, making a second page, copying and pasting some other shit, and then being able to print double-sided to make a very pretty, user-friendly intro letter and rates page.

Sadly, Microsoft has sucked all of the joy out of what used to be a kind of fun way to spend an hour with the result of the work being something to be a little source of pride: "Look, you guys! isn't this cool! See, you can just hand it out to people and it's all right there!"

So the main problem is an errant header.
I only want the header on the letter-side. It's an address and doesn't need to be repeated on the picture side.

I did everything I could remember how to do to make this little magic happen.

No dice.

I clicked on Help.
I have enough of a problem that when you look up anything in Help, you get 18 lines of crap that does not apply to what you want to do:
"Make header read backwards.
"Give header a shot of whiskey.
"Merge header and footer to middle of pager.
"Climb to the top of the header and open fire on the footer."

Not only are all of the offerings completely off the mark of what I'm aiming to do but they are links.
this wouldn't be a problem if those links didn't take me to the Internet where I have to choose from more other links or watch a demo.

A demo?

A fucking demo.

Microsoft is paying someone to video his or her poor self clicking through the steps of various header modifications and then using that video to "help" people like me.
I would seriously like to meet the person who thought it would be a good idea to put help topics in video form.
Am I supposed to follow along and click the same things that the video is showing me to click?
Also, the video is really, really, really slow. If you are the type of person to follow along, clicking away after the video, I would not worry about missing a step rather I would worry about wanting to take a ball point pen and stab your eye to keep yourself awake waiting for the next step to be shown.
You could probably make a couple of phone calls during the wait, or finish that book you brought to read at lunchtime while you're waiting for the video to show you the next step.

Like, two hours after I found a link that was sort of, maybe close to what I was actually trying to figure out how to do, I played with the instructions I'd gotten:
"Click View
"Select Breaks
"Select Section�. And so on," I eventually spent another sleepless night and several hours charting the various combinations of instructions to see which ones showed consistently and mayhap lead to the solution� after ALL of that, I got my document to do what I wanted it to do.

And it seems that I could have gotten it there a lot easier had the Help section just pulled only the key words I gave it for my search and then just laid out nice, clean steps as to how to make it work.

Is this the way everything is going?
Is everything going to be infinitely more complicated than it needs to be form here on out?
I am headed into my mid-thirties and I am gravely afraid that this might be one of my first experiences in getting old and out-dated. I can skate roller derby and have a cutting-edge job in an up-and-coming field all I want but at the end of the day, I CANNOT bear Microsoft Word putting videos online to show me how to fix a header, I just can't.

In other news, back again are we to my concerns that far too many men tell me I am the coolest chick they know.
It is great to be cool, it is great that these dudes seek me out and realize whatever it is that they realize whenever it is that they get it� or whatever.

But for reals.
If I am sooooo cool then why come it is that the revelation is always after the fact, when I am dunzo with checking out the guy or when he's revealed himself to be obsessive compulsive, afflicted with Tourette's, a drug-user (not the good kinds), or a felonious drunk?
Why am I not cool in the eyes of the guys who are a little bit settled, a little bit ambitious, and a lot mature enough to testify often to my supreme coolness AT THE TIME WE ARE DATING?
I just don't see how my meeting someone great would interrupt the space-time continuum yet somehow, there are like, cosmic forces demanding my romantic solitude and I really don't get that at all.

Maybe some geek at Microsoft can make a video for me.

arizonasarah at 12:32 p.m.

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