{"id":244,"date":"2006-12-07T18:48:00","date_gmt":"2006-12-08T01:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/?p=244"},"modified":"2006-12-07T18:48:00","modified_gmt":"2006-12-08T01:48:00","slug":"the-yearly-mail-merge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/?p=244","title":{"rendered":"the yearly mail merge"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yule is almost here and Mrs Elbeno and I have been writing the letter, which means that once again I get to figure out how to do a mail merge from the address book spreadsheet to a sheet of labels. And every year it changes slightly. This year it was quite easy though, despite the documentation being questionable (it told me to click on menu options and dialogs I didn&apos;t have).<\/p>\n<p>The only tricky part of the affair this year is the same as always: how to attempt to munge everything into a common format that fits on a label, when there are so many different address types. USA, UK, Europe, Japan, Australia, single line and multi-line addresses, zip codes, post codes, states, counties&#8230; but as long as it all fits on a label and all the info is there, I&apos;m going to trust the mail to deliver it.<\/p>\n<p>The other thing that caught my eye this morning was an essay by Cory Doctorow about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.informationweek.com\/story\/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196601781&#038;cid=RSSfeed_IWK_All\">How Vista Lets Microsoft Lock Users In<\/a>. I&apos;m not looking forward to this upgrade at work, which will doubtless come sooner or later. I&apos;ve said it before and I&apos;ll say it again: if you want what you write\/draw\/compose\/otherwise create today still to be freely viewable\/usable to you in 10 years&apos; time, don&apos;t use Microsoft products.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yule is almost here and Mrs Elbeno and I have been writing the letter, which means that once again I get to figure out how to do a mail merge from the address book spreadsheet to a sheet of labels. And every year it changes slightly. This year it was&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}