Male merge

A couple of weeks ago the night before the robotics tournament Graham was printing some things in my office and was running late. I saw that he was inserting the same number into spots in a couple of separate documents then printing them, one at a time. "You should use a mail merge for that" I said. Of course he had never heard of such a thing, I never had till I got out into the working world.

At any rate as we're approaching the upcoming state championships Graham needed to do the same thing and -- in a show of solid organization -- reminded me about it a couple of days beforehand. Excellent. Turns out to run a mail merge in Google Office you need to write a script, so it seemed the best thing to do was port it over to Word, which of course kids don't have on their computers.

So it was to be a father-son project or, as Graham so famously said once, a "son-father" project. Fair enough. 

Graham got home from practice last night around 9:30 and he came up to my office and we knocked it out. In fairness, it was mostly me doing the work, though I showed him the basic concept so he at least knows the term and knows some of the steps it takes, which is half the struggle. After that you just need to Google and trust yourself to figure it out.

It was nice to have a little project like that with Graham in the evening. It's lovely to teach your kids stuff.