141–150 of 159 posts
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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.
But if you don't like it, don't use it.
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I would personally replace "Tools" with "Cognitive models". A hammer and a nail gun really don't differ all that much when your task is binding wood.
As someone in the trades, I really disagree. Most applications that require a hammer could not be accomplished with a nail gun. Nail guns are great for attaching thin materials over thicker materials, like putting MDX onto a frame or attaching roofing materials. You don't generally frame with a nail gun because you want to use larger and heavier nails driven a lot deeper. For very light or precision work on finished…
It's a logical step from a hammer to another driver because you have experience with the fundamental tools.
I would say that cognitive models develop more rapidly and we design tools to fill that space, occasionally developing a tool that can expand the space, usually by building on knowns.
Sorry to diminish your trade in particular :) It was the first thing that came to mind.
I hope that makes sense in context.
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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…
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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 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.)
Sadly, it's a one-way trip, and collaborators usually can't be talked into adopting this arcane way of working.
But the emacs keybindings work flawlessly :-)
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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.
I never understood The New Yorker. This is in humor, is this supposed to be funny?
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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…
This is nerd-shaming, and just as bad as other types of shaming.
I don’t see it as nerd shaming. It seems to be more poking fun at the skills people list on their résumés.
"Well it's nice that you have a few university degrees and 19 yeras of experience in journalism; how proficient are you in MS Word?"
"Oh, I can't even begin to tell you how! You better sit back and relax as this story takes us all the way back to Windows 95 ..."
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…
I don't know what the explanation is for people not liking Word, but it can't be "because I like writing code to produce documents and LaTeX is the only option for that".
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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.)