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Monday, August 24, 2020

WordPad Columns for Dummies

WordPad Insert Object
WordPad Insert Object Menu
Perhaps one the of the most... irritating? traits of the eHow.com "contributor" (as their freelance writers were called) was that so many were desperate for the cash that they'd write any nonsense down and pretend it was the "answer" to whatever question they were pretending to answer. The site's 300-word minimum pretty much precluded ever saying, "Sorry, Charlie, you can't do that," which lead to such rubbish as Foye Robinson and her Techwalla.com post, "How to Make Columns in WordPad."

Foye, as she called herself before Demand Media made people use "real" names, did pretty much the same thing that Heather Wilkins did when she was asked to make a table in WordPad. Instead of saying, "You can't," both of them went straight to creating a table in html. Now, we ask you: is that creating a table in WordPad? Creating columns? No! it's creating a web page, one that you cannot update or edit without leaving your browser and going back into some form of text editor and fighting your way through raw html.
Not our idea of "easy." Leaf Group (the current alias for Demand Media) didn't make matters easier, either, by making a mess out of Foye's instructions. By that we mean that what she has originally typed (per the WayBack machine at archive.org) was,
"Add the following code to your WordPad document:<html>
<head>
<title>Your Page Title Goes Here</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>"
Leaf Group's "porting" program rendered that as,
"Add the following code to your WordPad document:
 "
A-yup... But the reality is that Robinson's "solution," like Wilkins' (which, coming two years later, was probably based on Foye's work),  was sloppy, inelegant, and downright stupid. If you really want to make columns in WordPad, just use the Insert Object function and stick in a spreadsheet. Easy-Peezy, and you can always open the spreadsheet from within WordPad and edit it... assuming you have Excel, anyway.

There: wasn't that easier than typing in a bunch of html code? Sure it was... not that our Dumbass of the Day would know!
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