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.
It's faster because you don't have to stop to select the text, you just type continuously.
> They can't navigate a paragraph or a line using home/end buttons. One of my biggest irritations in Word is that Ctrl-A/E don't go to the beginning/end of line. These key combinations (originally from Emacs) work on almost all input boxes on macOS. (IntelliJ is also an offender in this regard. Basically, any program that implements their own text boxes.)
If you set the keymap in IntelliJ to MacOS you get many of the Emacs keybindings including ctrl-a/e. I also make these shortcuts for beginning/end of line in Word (although the ability to add custom keyboard shortcuts seems to randomly disappear in my copy of Word).
Yes, IntelliJ is easy to fix, just the default is broken.
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…
I once needed to pivot a table. Tried it with excel, spent an hour googling, couldn't get it to work. Then exported it into SQL server, googled how to do it in T-sql, and was done shortly after. Respect for people who work with excel, but it's not for me.
Roughly,
Step 1: Insert pivot table
Step 2: Set data source
Step 3: set row (pivots)
Step 4: set value (summary)
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…
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.
Everyone has a workflow and wants the input data cleansed how they like. Science journals are just the worst. So much time and money wasted by researchers just doing things like adding a hundred words to this paragraph for this submission, limiting the references to 30 for that one, putting the images all on one document for this journal, putting them in separate files for that one, making the figures independent, making all subfigures together on one page, using this dpi, using that margin with, page numbers yes, page numbers no. Editors should just ask for submissions to be in plain text, images just uploaded in whatever quality you have them, and then they could have a simple bash script do all their inane formatting and automatically fit sub figures evenly to a page. They'd probably complain this maybe 25 line script I'm imagining would put them out of work, though, so I'm not holding my breath.
Might be a little bit off topic, but it blows my mind how functionally the office suite is unchanged for the past 30 years especially including how slow it runs. It's like there is this baked in knowledge that these apps have always been pretty slow and crappy in that regard, and since there is apparently no expectation from the paying customers that it won't ever be slow nor is there any competition (my workplace along with plenty of other enterprise customers will never not pay for both gsuite and ms office just because that's what they always blow money on), there's no pressure to make things performant. I wish I could degrade my workplace office 365 license into a windows XP era version of office. That would absolutely fly on modern hardware.
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…
Maybe just coincidence but I'm increasingly encountering non-software folks successfully building things in the AWS console that become business critical. I don't think it's much harder than building a super complex Excel sheet with pivot tables, custom formulas and data import/export functionality.
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.
It's funny how last time I used mail merge I was using Office 200o in Windows Me. I'm pretty curious about how many people use this kind of tools today.
I realize the article was supposed to be humorous (it's in the humor section), but the amusing thing is that I'm seeing declining use of Word. Communication has gotten a lot more formal. People are happy to edit a report in the e-mail editor, using a screen capture utility to copy and paste bitmap graphics when needed. Or they use the editor in the cloud version and don't bother to learn where all of its features are…
The amusing thing I am seeing is how much the decline of a tool aimed squarely at paper-based communication can still surprise me given the extent to which paper based communication has basically ceased to exist. The part of me that didn't expect the decline and the part that didn't expect Word to stick around so long don't even shout at each other, it's as if there wasn't any contradiction at all.
An amusing anecdote is that when my kids were in school, they were supposed to word process their written assignments according to formatting standards that included things like margins, for documents that would never be printed. And the standards came from a group that was ironically named "Modern Language Association."
Today kids just do everything in the cloud and don't think twice about it.
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.
It's faster because you don't have to stop to select the text, you just type continuously.
ctrl-i is stateful... typing ^isome text^i will get it in italics.