{"id":53,"date":"2005-10-09T14:03:49","date_gmt":"2005-10-09T18:03:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/2005-10-09\/mail-merge\/"},"modified":"2005-10-09T14:03:49","modified_gmt":"2005-10-09T18:03:49","slug":"mail-merge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/2005-10-09\/mail-merge\/","title":{"rendered":"Mail Merge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Accettura writes<\/a><\/p>\n

… You can have a ‘feature’ like Microsoft Office’s Mail Merge. It’s messy, has an awkward UI, and doesn’t always behave as the user would expect. It’s often considered to be one of the worst features in the entire suite…. I think that’s an example of the ugliness Asa hope to rip out (though different product [sic]).<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I seriously hope that Robert wasn’t for one second suggesting that Microsoft Office ought not have mail merge. Mail merge is one of those daily activities in some environments that absolutely is part of a complete word-processing\/office solution. You can’t just go around removing features because they have byzantine or even terrible UI. Features, even features that are only going to be used by 20% of the user population<\/strong> are necessary to sell a product<\/a>. The trick is not to remove features, but to make their use as painless as possible for the people that need them, and as invisible as possible for the people that don’t.<\/p>\n

At the same time, it is extremely important to understand that that Microsoft Office and Mozilla Firefox are in very different classes of software. A web browser is primarily a platform so that web content can do it’s stuff. All the fancy bookmarks and history integration planned for Firefox 2.0 is not there because users want fancy-pants bookmarks, it’s there so that the user can get to what they actually want to be using (the web) faster and better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Accettura writes … You can have a ‘feature’ like Microsoft Office’s Mail Merge. It’s messy, has an awkward UI, and doesn’t always behave as the user would expect. It’s often considered to be one of the worst features in the entire suite…. I think that’s an example of the ugliness Asa hope to rip […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mozilla"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}