Take that, Microsoft Office 2007!

Yes, it is true. Now that it is 2009, I have decided to update my life and move from Office 2003 to Office 2007.

I was hesitant to make the move for 2 reasons:

1. "I am proficient in all Office 2003 programs". For real. It took me years, but I could pretty much make Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other programs do anything I needed!
2. I am a "PowerPoint maven". Why would I switch to the new, weird PowerPoint when I had Old-PowerPoint skills?

But .. everyone else has made the switch, so I did too. Everyone kept sending me new documents that were not compatible with my old programs. :(

So, I have spent the last few weeks trying to regain my Office confidence.

Today was my first very serious attempt at Excel. I need to re-make some graphs that are for a (very) old manuscript that I am still trying to get published. This version of the manuscript is way better than older versions, but needed new fancy graphs.

It took me twice as long as normal to organize the data the correct way and get the graphs pretty much how I wanted them. Then I struggled for a little while to add a single, black straight line down the middle (Who know a LINE was actually a SHAPE?). Then, for my final act of madness, I wanted to add a pattern to 4 of the 12 bars. You know, like some diagonal stripes and some dots. So you can tell the difference between what the bars represent. After searching and asking and finally "googling", I discover Office 2007 does not have patterns for graphs!!

What? No graph patterns???

That is just plain old CRAZY! Crazy I tell you!!!!!!!

Thankfully, some brilliant person already figured this out and averted the problem! If you are searching on how to "make patterns on graphs in Excel 2007", just click here for the add-on! (Thank you Andy Pope, whoever you are!)

Can you believe those people at Microsoft? No patterns .... crazy....