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I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

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Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#101

Post by frosted-flakes »

ogogmad wrote: post #45
bitwize wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the kernel of truth is that people WANT tools that they can use from childhood to old age. Tools that will remain constant. Tools that can serve a variety of purposes. Tools that will be familiar even as the world changes. People say they want tools like that... then whinge when said tools don't keep in lockstep with current-year UI fads. The example I think of is Emacs. It works more or less the way it did…

Emacs is criticised for its very steep learning curve, not just for being different.

(Shallow learning curve. A steep learning curve means you acquire proficiency quickly—imagine a graph of proficiency over time.)

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#102

Post by solarkraft »

bambax wrote: post #31
3pt14159 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Excel its: Do you know arrays, UDFs, Solver, lookups, mastery over chart design, and cell formatting. With word it's basically: Can you do a mail merge and a table of contents? Congrats. You're an expert.

No. There is such a thing as proficiency in word processing. Most people don't use styles, or use them improperly, or modify every instance randomly. They use forced line breaks to adjust page breaks because they don't know about forced page breaks, or the "keep with next" paragraph setting. They've never heard of non-breaking space. They align numbers with spaces. They don't know that you can (and should) have accen…

> Most people don't use styles, or use them improperly, or modify every instance randomly.

To be fair to people who don't know (I agree that it's an important skill): It's kind of Word's fault. Direct formatting is easy while proper styling is hard and undiscoverable AF. People would probably immediately get it if the difficulties were reversed.

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#103

Post by commandlinefan »

bashinator wrote: post #95
commandlinefan wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a master's thesis using Word, and my thesis advisor got on to me about not taking advantage of all the Word features like styling and proper page-breaking, etc. A few years later I published a book using Word and my publisher demanded that I not use any of the Word "gimmicks" like styling and page-breaking.

Now I'm curious about what software is used in actual ink-on-dead-trees book publishing.

I submitted everything to them in Word documents (one document per chapter). They converted those to PDFs after having applied a lot of formatting and illustrating and sent me back the PDFs to review. If I found any mistakes, I marked up the PDF and sent it back to be updated and re-reviewed. So probably a lot of Adobe software?

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#104

Post by Scoundreller »

bashinator wrote: post #99
jamesliudotcc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this. But 99% of lawyers do not know how to do these things.

What is it about doctors, lawyers, and really really basic computer proficiency?

Their margins can be high enough to get away without squeezing out every efficiency known to humankind.

A cardiologist that pays someone to follow them around all day for the computer stuff makes 5% less than the one that DIYs it all. (And possibly makes up for it in increased billing, but it can slow things down too, especially as the interfaces improve).

There’s also a level of smugness about knowing a solution off the top of your head vs. Googling or researching it using subscribed DBs (by yourself or by your “law librarian”).

Personally, I’m happy if my doctor googles a solution and goes by a recent review article written by specialists in that area rather than “top of heading” with what they learned in a Continuing Ed session, marketing session or school (if it was long enough ago).

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#105

Post by openknot »

bashinator wrote: post #95
commandlinefan wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a master's thesis using Word, and my thesis advisor got on to me about not taking advantage of all the Word features like styling and proper page-breaking, etc. A few years later I published a book using Word and my publisher demanded that I not use any of the Word "gimmicks" like styling and page-breaking.

Now I'm curious about what software is used in actual ink-on-dead-trees book publishing.

I assume it's Adobe InDesign, from working at a couple student-run publications in college (allows more precise control over how to format text) and one in high school. I hope an industry expert in publishing can chime in, but in the meantime, it looks like professional users in graphic design subreddits mostly use InDesign, followed by Microsoft Publisher [0][1].

Outside of Reddit sources, Creative Bloq also suggests Affinity Publisher and QuarkXPress, but I can't immediately tell if the rankings are paid for or influenced by advertisers [2].

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Affinity/comments/gdqrux/thinking_o...

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/7p9s8q/shou...

[2] https://www.creativebloq.com/buying-guides/best-desktop-publ...

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#106

Post by Wistar »

bambax wrote: post #63
thomascgalvin wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people don't use styles, or use them improperly, or modify every instance randomly. This is (one of the reasons) why I write everything in Markdown and export it to Word or PDF with Pandoc. There's no temptation to "fix" the formatting as I go along; it's just text, and I can apply a style sheet after the fact.

Yeah, well, ironically enough, working like this makes you a very proficient Word user.

Exactly. Pound it in and then paint on the styling. This is very difficult for some to do. I once found my daughter sobbing over a high school writing assignment in Word because her desire to make the paper look perfect as she wrote was causing the document to asplode.

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#107

Post by user_7832 »

azalemeth wrote: post #58

I cannot tell you how un productive I am in Microsoft Word. I use LaTeX, often in overleaf, often natively in linux, often on MacOS. Naturally, the latter has a Word version available in it and as a scientist at the interface of physics and biology/medicine I (un)fortunately have plenty of experience in both. Some of my colleagues carte-blanch refuse to try TeX (interestingly, I've never had a doctor refuse to write…

Counterpoint: Working in anything not a WYSISYG editor (or close, like markdown) is painful for me. Changing styles and formatting is direct - there is no code that you need to worry about, and no "27 errors" because you (or the others in your team) messed up a few semicolons somewhere. Mind you, I'm not saying that latex is bad (especially for citations). But if I'm driving a car at highway speeds I'd rather have the car have handle autobraking and power steering and ABS rather than not.

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#108

Post by ogogmad »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #101
ogogmad wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is criticised for its very steep learning curve, not just for being different.

(Shallow learning curve. A steep learning curve means you acquire proficiency quickly—imagine a graph of proficiency over time.)

Interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve

The common expression "a steep learning curve" is a misnomer suggesting that an activity is difficult to learn and that expending much effort does not increase proficiency by much, although a learning curve with a steep start actually represents rapid progress.

I originally said "high learning curve", but I started wondering what it meant for a curve to be "high". I then looked up the "correct" expression -- and copied it because it was a common usage -- but found it confusing for the reason you said. The confusion might come from climbing a steep hill: It's tiring.

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#109

Post by RajBhai »

3pt14159 wrote: post #21
version_five wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked adjacent to financial consultants who build excel models all day. There is such thing as an "expert" at excel. I've interviewed lots of people who say they "know" excel, but when you dig into it, it's the equivalent of saying they know a programming language because they know basic flow control syntax. With word, I'm not sure if you can go as deep expertise wise as excel, but there is still much more to i…

With Excel its: Do you know arrays, UDFs, Solver, lookups, mastery over chart design, and cell formatting. With word it's basically: Can you do a mail merge and a table of contents? Congrats. You're an expert.

Probably not the right forum for this, but does anyone know if it's possible to mail merge into separate Word docs, one for each recipient in the data source? I can only ever get a single document with all the outputs concatenated.

My workflow requires that I send out actual mail, in which case the concatenated result doesn't matter once printed, but I'd like to keep a copy of the individual docs for record keeping.

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#110

Post by bambax »

openknot wrote: post #105
bashinator wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I'm curious about what software is used in actual ink-on-dead-trees book publishing.

I assume it's Adobe InDesign, from working at a couple student-run publications in college (allows more precise control over how to format text) and one in high school. I hope an industry expert in publishing can chime in, but in the meantime, it looks like professional users in graphic design subreddits mostly use InDesign, followed by Microsoft Publisher [0][1]. Outside of Reddit sources, Creative Bloq also suggest…

Quark XPress used to be the best publishing software; then their CEO made a number of very bad decisions and they almost disappeared from the scene. The standard is now InDesign. It's very good but very expensive. Affinity Publisher is ok, lacks some advanced features, but is so cheap compared to InDesign it may as well be free. MS Publisher, I'm not sure. Never really heard about it in good or bad.
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