The Toolchain From Hell

hfh

A family member just wrote his PhD thesis. This is the toolchain he used to attach a legend to his statistical graphs:

SPSS outputs the Graph. He makes a screenshot, imports that into Powerpoint, manually builds the legend, takes a screenshot, crops this to only contain the graph+legend, imports that to Word, prints it as a PDF and then imports that PDF in his main document.

Predictably he got in trouble when he needed to change a label on every graph. His solution was "interesting": insert textboxes in the main Word document, align them so they are over the images so you can only see the label in the textbox as it lies over the image. Luckily, Word anchors the textboxes relative to the image, so when the images move about the page, the textboxes-plastered-over-the-wrong-label are moved correctly.

Needless to say, all references are hardcoded into the text (e.g. "see figure 3.14"). At least he autogenerates the TOC.

Maybe this is an instance of the Word-is-not-a-typewriter antipattern?

pbean

Needs more wooden table.

dtech

@hfh said:

Maybe this is an instance of the Word-is-not-a-typewriter antipattern?

Well, everyone with a small amount of brains should now Word is really just the perfect environment for every application that needs to mix VBA and .NET.

WTF meter at level 57

snoofle

@dtech said:

@hfh said:
Maybe this is an instance of the Word-is-not-a-typewriter antipattern?

Well, everyone with a small amount of brains should now Word is really just the perfect environment for every application that needs to mix VBA and .NET.

Outstanding use of the WTF-o-meter! I would like to strongly encourage folks to use this excellent tool!!!

Hey Alex, perhaps it's possible to tie the star-ratings at the top of the page to this meter?

Happy New Year to all!

danixdefcon5

@dtech said:

@hfh said:
Maybe this is an instance of the Word-is-not-a-typewriter antipattern?
Well, everyone with a small amount of brains should now Word is really just the perfect environment for every application that needs to mix VBA and .NET.

Ah, Word "programming". I'd rather have the wooden table approach this guy did than "dynamic" graph reprogramming.

I sense a disturbance in the force...

emurphy

@hfh said:

SPSS outputs the Graph.

Am I the only one who read this as "SSDS" at first?

dhromed

@emurphy said:

@hfh said:
SPSS outputs the Graph.

Am I the only one who read this as "SSDS" at first?

I did it, too.