For some reason, I really don’t know, I’m obsessing over should I get a new camera or not. The camera that I have now is perfectly fine and works great. Not only that, like a lot of other people into photography, I’ve got a fair amount of money invested in lens, accessories and so on. But still, I find myself asking “Hmmm. I wonder if I should look at [insert camera name here].”

And so it goes, two good friends of mine have loaned me two different cameras to shoot with for a few days. +Brian Matiash has loaned me his Fuji X100. My good buddy Rick LePage has loaned me his Panasonic GF1 (he just got the new Panasonic GX1). I haven’t shot with the GF1 yet because I need to get the X100 back to Brian sooner but so far, I’m kind of enjoying the X100. More than I thought.

Yesterday morning was pretty cold here (at least for Portland). Not unbearable, but cold enough that there was a fair amount of frost and light ice on my car that needed to be thawed out before I was going to go anywhere. I’m not sure if the ice was that thick or that maybe my 1999 Honda Accord needs to be taken in and have the A/C and Defroster looked at, but it took a good 10 minutes for everything to heat up and get rid of that ice.

So while I was sitting there, I thought I’d play with the X100. Here’s the first shot.

Like any fast lens shot at a wide aperture, the plane of focus was pretty narrow and I really liked how the corners were nice and blurry while the middle section was more in focus. Not as much in focus as I thought it was going to be, but it’s still okay. At least for me. The AF sensor indicated it was in focus, but alas, it’s still a little soft in there. But for what it was, it’s fine.

The second shot, which is the one at the top of the post, was taken a few minutes later as the ice began to melt. I love the creamy look of the blurred areas. I’d been told by others that the bokeh on the X100 was something very nice and I’d have to agree.

I shot some video last night with the X100 and I need to take a closer look at that still. Some things about it I liked, and others I didn’t. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything yet that I couldn’t have done with my Canon 5D Mark II just yet (assuming a comparable f-stop on my lens). One nice thing is that it is definitely smaller than the 5D Mark II which makes it great to carry around. But smallness in any camera’s form factor has it’s drawbacks. Specifically, it was difficult for me to grab and adjust the focus on the X100. Maybe I’d get used to that over time, I’m not sure. But the first time out last night, it was a bit tricky.

Anyway, I’m liking the X100 more than I thought. Enough to buy one though? I’m not sure yet. We’ll have to see.

As such, we’ve resorted to just using that industry standby, Microsoft Word. For the past several years, I’ve maintained a Word document that is pre-formatted for Avery labels that we use and just added the rows needed if the list grows. But not this year. Chris wanted to alphabetize the list in Excel. So now I had to figure out how to go from Excel to Word to Labels. Fortunately, it was pretty easy. Here’s how I did it.

Now, why the list needed to be alphabetized, I’m not sure exactly because it’s not like the stack of letters is going to stay alphabetized when I drop them into the mail box, but hey, I’m not the one maintaining the list anymore so I won’t question the reason. As I always say,

you may ask me what to do or how to do it, but not both

So the Excel spreadsheet started out with several columns, but more or less they were:

• Name
• City
• State
• Zip

Pretty standard. But the Name column contained names like this:

Last name, Name and Name

and

Last name Family

The reason she did this was, obviously, so she could sort the entire list once she added all names (as they came to her and not necessarily alphabetically). But sending a bunch of cards addressed “Smith, Jane and Joe” isn’t what I wanted to do.

So I inserted several columns to the right of Column A (which had the names in them) and then used Excel’s Text to Columns feature (located under the Data menu for us Mac OS X users – Windows users, you’re on your own). Just select the cell or the range of cells in the column you want to work on and choose Data > Text to Columns.

Be sure to select the Delimited option and then click Next >

In step 2, I checked the boxes for Comma and Space since my cell contents had either a comma, a space, or both that I wanted to get rid of.

Finally in step 3, I just click Finish, though as I write this, I suppose I could have checked the Radio Button to format the column data as Text, but it really didn’t matter I suppose.

This takes Excel a second or two to deal with and then I now have a column for each of the following (the pipe character signifies a column separator here).

Last Name | Name | and | Name

or

Smith | Joe | and | Jane

Now, I need to get “Joe and Jane” from three separate columns into a single column. To do that, I’m going to bust out the CONCATENATE function in Excel which will combine the contents of multiple cells into a single cell.

The formula looks like this:

=CONCATENATE(B1," ",C1," ",D1)

Where B1, C1 and D1 are the columns where “Joe”, “and” and “Jane” are located. The quotes with the space in between are there so the result comes out as:

Joe and Jane

and not

JoeandJane

So far so good, but if I stop now, it won’t really work because while it appears to you when you read the spreadsheet on the screen that the cell contents are “Joe and Jane”, the cell really contains a formula and not a value. So I copied the cell(s) and then in a new column I paste it using the Paste Special command and then choose to paste it as a value. Now, the text “Joe and Jane” are in there the way I want to make sure they’re compatible no matter where I send or use this document.

Families can be such a pain

Now I realized that some of the names in our list were not to an individual or individuals (like Joe and Jane) but rather to a family. So in one cell, we had “Smith Family”. And after running Text to Columns, I now have “Smith” and “Family” in two columns. But getting a letter that just says “Smith Family” isn’t as nice in my opinion as “The Smith Family”. “The” makes you a little more important – or gives the illusion of importance in my opinion (just look at my blog title – clearly importance is an illusion in my case).

So to fix this, I wrote a quick conditional formula that said If the value “family” existed in a specific column, then look in the previous column, grab the actual family name and put “The ” in front of it. So now where I just had:

Smith | Family

I’ve got:

The Smith | Family

Where now “The Smith” is in the First Name column of my spreadsheet and “Family” is in the Last Name column of my spreadsheet. I then deleted all of the extra, original columns that I’m not using any more and I’m just left with Fist Name, Last Name, City, State, Zip.

Save the file and close it.

Off to Word

In Word, I just opened a new blank document and from the Tools menu, I choose Mail Merge Manager.

Click the Create New option.

When you click Create New, you’ll see the above pop-up menu. Choose Labels…

You’ll then be prompted to tell Word the label style you’re using. Select yours and then click OK.

Next, we’re going to tell Word about the Excel spreadsheet we created earlier. Click on the Get List option under number 2 “Select Recipients List”.

Then click Open Data Source. You’ll then navigate to where you saved your Excel spreadsheet and select it and click the Open button.

Just click OK here in the next dialog that shows up.

Here is where you’ll tell Word how to use the data from the spreadsheet. That big empty white space in the dialog above is an example of your label. From the drop down menu labeled “Insert Merge Field” are the names that you gave to your columns in your spreadsheet. In my case, it is First Name, Last Name, City, State and Zip. Just select them in the order you want them to appear. You can press the “return” key on your keyboard to start a new line.

Mine looked like this when I was done.

Click OK when you’re done. Don’t forget, you can add other characters in addition to the line breaks with the return key. I added a comma after City for example.

Once you’d done that, you’ll see the Mail Merge Manager dialog showing additional information. At this point, I have no need to Filter Recipients or Preview the Results (one at a time FYI). So I just click on number 6 – Complete Merge.

Then, I clicked on the second icon from the left which took all of that data and merged it to a new document that was properly formatted for the labels I was printing on.

It worked fabulous and was done in significantly less time than it took to write this blog post and less time than if I had to manually adjust the spreadsheet that my wife is using to keep our Christmas Card address on.

I’m mostly posting this so I don’t forget what I did when my wife asks me to do this again in 12 months, but if it helps someone else – all the better!