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[dreamshark]

All night long I dream about spreadsheets. It's getting kind of old.

The spreadsheets aren't old, though, they are perpetually NEW! The latest, and presumably final, schedule is online in Excel format, both as a grid and as a sorted event list. There are HTML versions of both, which may be just slightly out of date, but pretty close. Peter is laying out the pocket program right now.

I'm flummoxed by the tentcard task. I extracted the lists of events and panelists into Word documents, but it took me well over an hour to reformat the names into tentcards for the Friday events alone. I know a lot of Word tricks, but apparently not enough. I sent the formatted Friday ones to Larry so he could print them. And, feeling hopeful, I also sent him the unformatted Saturday/Sunday ones, hoping that he could find a magical way to quickly transform them into tentcards for me.

Tonight I'm picking up Mary Kay Kare at the airport at about 6:30. I'll be at the work party eventually - timing depends on what Mary Kay wants to do. If anybody needs to get hold of me today re the schedule, call my cell or email my work address. If you don't have that... comment to me here.

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I rather like the idea of people writing their names on their tent cards, just as I like the idea of people writing their names on their badges. Computer power users cringe at such non-technological solutions, but honestly, I think taking the easy way out just leaves more energy for things that actually matter.

Alternatively, Beth knows lots of Word tricks and she is also a Windows user.

K. [I'd come to the work party, but think probably B. would rather I stay home with him on his first evening back]

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Good point - I suppose it wouldn't be an unmitigated disaster if panelists had to *gasp* write their own names. We'd probably need a 12-pack of black markers, but buying markers is probably easier than hand-formatting 150 &%(*##^$ tentcards.

Maybe Bruce would like to come to the work party for a while and entertain us as we collate with tales of his travels before the two of you slip away for some romantic time alone? Just a thought. I can see how home would seem like the best place to be after a trip to the other side of the world.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

In my experience, when panelists write their own names, they don't write enough, or big enough, or boldly enough, or legibly enough, with the result that often the tent card doesn't serve very well to identify the person.

Which is not to say that computer printed tent cards are an absolute necessity.

I remember spending far too much of my WFC back in whichever of 92/93 it was running the software to generate tent cards. I didn't have data extraction problems (I think it was coming out of a database), but it turned out that the process which went quickly on my desktop went very very slowly on my laptop of the time.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

WFC?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Thanks for getting this cleared up without even waiting for me to come back! David is of course correct about what I meant by "WFC".

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Well, this is way to late for this year, but couldn't you just make the document top margin huge so that it pushes the text into the bottom half of the page, then put a page break after each name? You could even do the latter as a one-step search & replace. Or is there something about tent cards that I'm not grasping? Are you trying to print the panel info on the back side so that it's right side up for the panelists (i.e.,upside down relative to the name)? Now THAT would be tricky.