Excel

 Today, I worked with another teacher to make some charts in Excel 2008. There are times I get quite frustrated with trying to get the formatting and even the right data represented. In the end, I couldn’t get one set of labels to display horizontally without making another set vertical, so I just put a text box over that part of the chart and wrote them in. The charts, in their working form, were appreciated by the other teacher, but he was doing all of the data analysis. I feel that I just did layout and design work which in this case amounted to grappling with Excel and making it do mostly what I wanted. I feel that there was a sweet spot in the development of the program when the basics were done automatically, but one had the ability to really control much of the layout and formatting. It seems to be harder to do that now. Perhaps I am just rusty and the controls have been evolved.