I have a client up the road who needed to learn how to print some labels for his small business so he asked me to come up and give him a run-through on how to do it. (First, he had to type the addresses into a spreadsheet, we are talking starting from scraps of paper here. )

Before I went up to his house I Googled around looking for some material on mail merge for him and came up with the YouTube channel from HampshireCollegeIT which is really very good. Their video on creating labels with data from an Excel spreadsheet was just the ticket. I also immediately found a decent PDF that he could print and refer to.

Now granted, I had to massage his spreadsheet a little. He had some blank cells which was freaking Word out and we needed to break things down a little more (separate cells for town and state) but my point is, all the information he needed was available to him. He just did not know how to find it. He could even have looked it up in Word Help.

Most of the information you need to operate a computer and its accompanying software is right inside the box in the form of the Help menu. A Google search will oftentimes get you everything you need in the way of directions on how to accomplish any task.

Really when you think about it, the resources so easily available to us are absolutely stunning. My personal epiphany occurred when I was able to diagnose, disassemble and repair my dryer with information and directions found using internet search.

But my client just isn’t comfortable doing that and that’s fine. He really would rather not use a computer at all and I respect that.  I have several friends who feel the same way. So we went through the process with the addresses that he had gotten into the spreadsheet, I bookmarked the video for him and gave him the PDF file.

He called once – a question about cell formatting – but seems to have been doing fine since then.