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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

#121

Post by malodyets »

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 have worked in ink-on-dead-trees book publishing for over 20 years.

The vast majority of print-interior typesetting is being done with Adobe InDesign.

Some publishers (still) have their own system that does not use Word styles - usually using ASCII tags inserted into the content. These are often legacy approaches dating from the 1980s, but if it works why change it?

A few have begun to use Markdown-based systems, but this is very rare in commercial publishing.

The vast majority of author-to-editor-preproduction workflows are done in Microsoft Word. Some publishers (including the one I worked for, and the ones I work with now) use Word styles for all content formatting. Part of the editorial "pre-production" task is to take what authors give us (font formatting with bold / italic, paragraph formatting with returns and tabs) and convert it to styles.

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

#122

Post by bambax »

bthallplz wrote: post #118
bambax wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They are very surprised to learn you can type in italics directly using underscores. What does this mean? I'm not finding it on Google.

Type an underscore, type your word, or a sequence of words, type another underscore (no space before): the word is in italics. Works with stars/asterisks for bold. Much faster than selecting what you want to highlight, and clicking on the appropriate icon or even doing CTRL+I/B.

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

#124

Post by Kon-Peki »

suifbwish wrote: post #26
culturestate wrote: post #13

Maybe I'm the one misunderstanding this, but... This piece isn't about Word or nerd-shaming or the author's self-perceived mastery of desktop publishing. It reads like a take on the absurdity of people constantly adding inane things like "must be proficient in Microsoft Word" to job postings and, consequently, their appearance on the CV of every person who applies to be a corporate drone in the western world. On the…

What about “can programmatically generate word documents and xlsx files in Python”

In the context of this article, it is only impressive if you can do it in PowerShell.

As an aside, doing it in PowerShell has one advantage - any Windows computer with Office installed can be used without any other dependency. A major disadvantage is that it is slow as molasses if you try to write more than a few hundred rows of data. FYI - we create (and sell) Excel spreadsheets full of data, one of which contains a tab with 90+ million rows, and a Go program will run circles around the equivalent Python program :)

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

#125

Post by eyeundersand »

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…

Thank you! I submitted a paper to a conference this week but my advisor does not use LaTeX. You can imagine the suffering I had to go through during the draft process.

It's such a PAIN! to have to work on Word for any kind of scientific writing. The formatting issues make me want to cry. I'm also on Linux so no desktop Word client and using Word or google docs on the web is extremely slow and frustrating. LibreOffice Writer comes with some compatibility issues.

Anyone who is doing technical work and needs to have stuff in writing often definitely needs to learn Markdown at the very least, imo. You are needlessly limiting yourself and causing a lot of pain to collaborators by sticking to Word.

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

#126

Post by eyeundersand »

user_7832 wrote: post #107
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 th…

This might be the first time that I've seen someone who's used both WYSISYG and TeX pick the former. If you don't mind, how proficient are you in TeX?

As someone mentioned in another thread, the formatting in Word and other such software is terribly inconsistent. No guarantee that the document will look the same in two machines, let alone across platforms. The formatting is "direct" for a while but change a single period or colon anywhere in the document and that messes everything up.

Not sure I understand the driving analogy. Care to explain?

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

#127

Post by [deleted] »

seanccox wrote: post #77
culturestate wrote: post #13

Maybe I'm the one misunderstanding this, but... This piece isn't about Word or nerd-shaming or the author's self-perceived mastery of desktop publishing. It reads like a take on the absurdity of people constantly adding inane things like "must be proficient in Microsoft Word" to job postings and, consequently, their appearance on the CV of every person who applies to be a corporate drone in the western world. On the…

Yeah, it's satire in the 'humor' section of the New Yorker.

[deleted]

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

#128

Post by eyeundersand »

mabub24 wrote: post #82
unixhero wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about LaTeX?

If you think about how LaTeX has little to no use outside of certain sciences and maths in largely academic settings, then it's pretty obvious to understand that most people in publishing have very little interest in learning something entirely new when Word, which they've probably used for decades now, gets the job done just fine until they slap all of it into InDesign for the final typesetting anyway. Besides, type…

> has little to no use outside of certain sciences and maths in largely academic settings

This is just incorrect. TeX is typesetting software so it's extremely versatile and allows you to do a wide range of things that are not possible with WYSIWYG editors and Markdown.

Consider: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/940/what-professions...

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

#129

Post by lapsed_pacifist »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #100
mauvehaus wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, if you haven't seen "Reality Contains a Surprising Amount of Detail", prepare to be delighted. Also: I thought there were framing nailers that fire larger coated sinkers like you'd drive with a hammer? When are those appropriate, and when should nailing framing be done by hand?

No one hammers framing nails by hand anymore, except occasionally. The framing nailer has completely taken over. There are even very good cordless framing nailers now, so no dragging an air hose behind you everywhere you go.

It's been a few years since I did any framing, so I could be wrong about the current state of the industry.

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

#130

Post by pxx »

bambax wrote: post #122
bthallplz wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are very surprised to learn you can type in italics directly using underscores. What does this mean? I'm not finding it on Google.

Type an underscore, type your word, or a sequence of words, type another underscore (no space before): the word is in italics. Works with stars/asterisks for bold. Much faster than selecting what you want to highlight, and clicking on the appropriate icon or even doing CTRL+I/B.

How in the world is this faster than ctrl-i? It's the same number of keystrokes and _ is further away than i. If you're annoyed about how far Ctrl is, maybe you should have the key left of 'a' bound to it.

Also you don't want to be using ad-hoc styling in Word to begin with. It's definitely an anti-pattern.

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