This was a bad day for talking paperclips, but a great day for smugness, as it enabled me to send .docx files to friends and colleagues with impunity, flush with delight at the fact that many recipients would be unable to open them.

Strangely, this flourishing community of wizards was nowhere to be found. Perhaps I was not yet worthy of their presence? Did I need to complete a tutorial in magick and memos before they would appear? Baffled, I hit "F1". I typed "wizard" into the help box. What I saw destroyed the last vestiges of my lost imagination:
What happened to the wizards?Oh dear. They've killed them all.
After the Microsoft Office 2003 release, the wizards, such as memo wizard and resume wizard in Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010 and chart wizard in Microsoft Excel 2007 and 2010 were replaced with templates that are available on the Microsoft Office.com website.
Immediately I was reminded of that poignant yet heart-wrenching scene in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, where Jedi across the galaxy are in one fell swoop betrayed, murdered and annihilated by the dark lord Palpatine. The same fate had befallen the race of Microsoft wizards. As I was when I first watched that film, I was close to tears (but, let me reassure you, Star Wars III has not and will not make it to the vaunted list of Films Which Have Made Me Cry—those being Shrek, Shrek 2, and Beethoven).

Vale, the age of wizards. Here's to 1997.
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