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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

#151

Post by benhurmarcel »

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…

I agree that LaTeX is much more pleasant to work with, and I’d rather use it than Word.

However I still have “Proficient with Microsoft Office" on my CV (along with LaTeX) because companies expect it, and I’ll be forced to use it. I often write reports in Word, not because I prefer it over LaTeX, but because it’s mandated by the company.

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

#152

Post by frosted-flakes »

vba616 wrote: post #150
frosted-flakes wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why can't I put time on the Y axis?

You can—but that would be unusual.

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

#154

Post by matt-attack »

bambax wrote: post #141
pxx wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ctrl-i is stateful... typing ^isome text^i will get it in italics.

Yeah ok, that'd be better than selecting after the fact, but it's not "the same number of keystrokes". It breaks the flow a little, whereas using _ doesn't. But if you don't like it, don't use it.

Not to belabor this point but it is indeed the same number of key strokes. CTRL i requires two keys and and underscore required two keys as well.

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

#155

Post by bambax »

matt-attack wrote: post #154
bambax wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah ok, that'd be better than selecting after the fact, but it's not "the same number of keystrokes". It breaks the flow a little, whereas using _ doesn't. But if you don't like it, don't use it.

Not to belabor this point but it is indeed the same number of key strokes. CTRL i requires two keys and and underscore required two keys as well.

Ah yes, that's the reason for the argument then. On a French (AZERTY) keyboard underscore is its own key, no shift or ctrl.

(There are ways to configure the keyboard to change the arrangement of keys to best suit your needs. I used to do this, but the big drawback is that if you change machines all your habits are wrong and you waste a lot of time finding the keys again.)

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

#156

Post by 3pt14159 »

RajBhai wrote: post #109
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.

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.

Two days later this kinda proves my point above. Had you asked about anything my OP there would have been 7 different work arounds or solutions offered up. But even on HN nobody cares enough about Word to really be a master at it because there is no point to mastery. You're not running $400m models on a Word doc.

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

#157

Post by Kon-Peki »

suifbwish wrote: post #147
Kon-Peki wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you use threading, cython to run as c or a cuda gpu library, and of course customize the memory/processor availability of Python, it would be a challenge worth taking. Most people who say Python is slow do not know much about optimizing it.

You know, you are right about that in general. We didn’t try your suggestion, but consider that generating an Excel file is probably not very thread-friendly (an Excel file is actually just a zipped directory structure containing a handful of XML files - change the file extension from .xlsx to .zip and have fun exploring!).

In this particular use case, the developer effort vs performance ratio is just insanely in favor of Go.

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

#158

Post by beerandt »

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.

I always first ask if they've ever used VBA in excel, and if so, for what?

If they even know what you're talking about, then that's a quick way to skip the rest of the probing and assume they know (or can quickly figure out) the rest.

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

#159

Post by user_7832 »

eyeundersand wrote: post #126
user_7832 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

I'm admittedly not very good at TeX - I can make a document and work, but will likely hit a few errors. It's not that I can't use it properly - I consider myself decently tech-savvy (this is hackernews after all) and I am used to coding (C++/python, even a bit of html and css), and I frequently Google whenever I get stuck. However I find most tasks in tex (I mainly use overleaf) much longer than the corresponding task in word. I don't think I have ever gotten "stuck" in word the way you can in overleaf (eg numbered lists). I don't have to worry about an entire file system with different files for different chapter and images in word, for example - the software handles that itself - you add a '1.' and word starts a numbered list. Fewer buttons to press.

Mind you, it's not that I don't understand the reasoning behind TeX - yes, it is quite logical - but to use another terrible analogy (sorry!) it's like comparing assembly code for a particular computer with python - one is way more specific and doesn't have half a dozen dependencies, but the other is much more "human" in its use and readability.

I fully agree that word compatibility is terrible and I hate MS's monopolistic practices as much (I use OpenOffice too and prefer odt files). But within our university everyone has the latest version of word and things work reasonably decently.

(The driving analogy was that Office assumes and does things for you automatically, just like a car activating the ABS system, while with TeX you manually need to do it. More control, but also more effort.)

(Also, Google docs >>> Word imo. Amongst other reasons, because word doesn't support fonts like Inter properly.)

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