I took one for the team

 

We issue audit reports that are a combination of pages printed from Microsoft Word for the narrative part, Excel for the actual financial statements, and with one page printed on letterhead.  So after printing, there is assembly and proofing to make sure everything gets put together in the right order.  After all of that, we turn around and scan the report back into digital form.  For years, I’ve been wanting to streamline the process by combining these individual parts digitally before printing instead of manually afterward, but the skills required are beyond our basic word processing ability at Taylor, Roth and Company.  I thought maybe over time we’d accidentally hire the skills to figure this out ourselves, but we keep hiring accountants and not word processing experts, so that hasn’t happened yet.

 

I decided to handle this myself.  There are two parts to the challenge:  first, somehow combine Word and Excel pages into a single seamless document and second, insert the letterhead page digitally right into the document instead of having to separately print one page on letterhead.  I decided to attack the second challenge first; one page of letterhead inserted digitally into a document.  How hard could it be?  We even have a digital copy of our letterhead already.

 

I pressed F1 in Word for help.  I searched for “letterhead”.  I read the results.  I couldn’t understand the options.  I Googled “how to insert letterhead into Microsoft Word documents.”  Still too hard.  I don’t want to spend the time learning to be an expert in word processing so I’ll know how to do it, I just want it done.

 

I Googled “Help with Microsoft Word”.  I’ll just pay someone who already knows how to do it to do it for me.  The point-and-pay method.  $79.  A bargain.

 

It didn’t turn out to be quite that easy.  It took three separate tech support sessions spread out over three days, with my computer held hostage for hours altogether while the tech worked on my screen instead of his own.  But finally, we have it; the result.

 

And the result is:  I fired them.  Most of the work was by live chat, but when we talked on the phone I couldn’t understand them.  When I explained what I wanted, they couldn’t understand me.  What they produced was wrong and I couldn’t get them to understand why.  I gave up.  I meant to fall on the tech support grenade for the good of the team, but my effort fell short.

 

I still think this is a 5 minute job for someone who knows what they’re doing; I just haven’t found that person yet.  Once we figure that out, we’ll move on to the harder question about combining dissimilar files into a single document.