I was able to get home Friday evening but it started snowing overnight and didn't stop until 5:00 PM on Saturday. We got about 8 inches which is a lot for us. This gave me time to work on PALM. I had my annual battle with Mail Merge and completed the confirmation letter that I will be sending out after I process the applications (and which I will mail to you in the self addressed, stamped envelope that you will remember to send to me). Is there any decent tutorial on Word's Mail Merge anywhere that covers things like optional text and how to make Mail Merge fields appear in the Word document? Forget Word Help. It tells you how to create labels, but nothing deeper. The best I've been able to find by searching with Google is company/university instructions to their employees/students on how to use Mail Merge . There's got to be something more organized than that. (The label part works well. It was very easy to create the mailing labels I needed for the Canadians on our mailing list from scratch. And I found out that Scar, ON is really Scarborough, Ontario if you're Canadian.)
Once again Andy Vast Binder plotted the PALM proposed daily routes in MapMyRide. You can find them by using the Key Words PALM 28 in Advanced Search on the MapMyRide site. I added links to the maps to the PALM website. You'll notice that the Miles on the PALM 2009 Route table are hyperlinks. Click these links to get to Andy's MapMyRide routes.
What else to do on a snow day? The Free Press had an article about seed catalogs on Saturday, so as the snow was coming down, I was ordering my free Johnny's Seed Catalog on the web. I found out that you can lease a lot for a garden from the Michigan Land Bank for $50 a year. I went to their website and found a vacant lot that I can lease two blocks from my house.
Do you see a problem with what I've been writing about? It's winter and it will be winter for 3 months and everything that I've been writing about and doing is about spring and summer. Obviously this is a guy who hasn't embraced winter. It's not that I don't go outside. For instance, I had to take a picture of the vacant lot for my garden to send in with my application. (All you see is snow in the picture. I could send a blank sheet of paper with the application and it be the same thing.) And I do get the paper from off the front porch. But the best I can come up with for a winter activity is going to Florida, which is pretty bad for someone who's lived all his life in Michigan.
What else to do on a snow day? The Free Press had an article about seed catalogs on Saturday, so as the snow was coming down, I was ordering my free Johnny's Seed Catalog on the web. I found out that you can lease a lot for a garden from the Michigan Land Bank for $50 a year. I went to their website and found a vacant lot that I can lease two blocks from my house.
Do you see a problem with what I've been writing about? It's winter and it will be winter for 3 months and everything that I've been writing about and doing is about spring and summer. Obviously this is a guy who hasn't embraced winter. It's not that I don't go outside. For instance, I had to take a picture of the vacant lot for my garden to send in with my application. (All you see is snow in the picture. I could send a blank sheet of paper with the application and it be the same thing.) And I do get the paper from off the front porch. But the best I can come up with for a winter activity is going to Florida, which is pretty bad for someone who's lived all his life in Michigan.
2 comments:
I use Word to generate letters. In addition to simply inserting name, address, etc, I use "If . . Then . . Else" from the "Insert Word Field" menu to insert the text "alumni" or "friends" in the letter, depending on the contents of a column in my fields list. Is that the kind of thing you mean?
By the way, going south works. In 2005 I went to Arizona and attended a White Sox spring training game. Even though it was March, the tail end of winter, the weather a wonderful change and the Sox won the World Series that year.
I use the confirmation letter that I sent out last year as a starting point for this year's confirmation letter. I couldn't see the Mail Merge fields in the old letter. It ends up you have to check the Field Codes box in the Show pane in Tools -> Options to be able to see If .. Then .. Else statements. To generate the brackets for a Mail Merge field you need to click Ctl F9. This doesn't seem obvious to me and I have to remember it every year. Of course, I am an old guy. I have yet to find a good reference on Mail Merge.
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