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

newyorker.com

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

#31

Post by bambax »

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.

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 accented capital letters in languages such as French, and that there's a specific option to set for that. They don't understand footnotes, type the footnote text in the text itself and wonder where it's gone after page reflow. They don't know anything about ToC, or ToC formatting. They are very surprised to learn you can type in italics directly using underscores. They can't navigate a paragraph or a line using home/end buttons. They select text with the mouse, which takes like two minutes in a long document, instead of 500ms when using CTRL+Shift + End/Home, or CTRL+A.

And let's not talk about composition. Alignments. Bullets, bullet types. Margins. Sections. Checking for rivers.

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

#32

Post by ballenf »

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…

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.

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

#33

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

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…

You think "must be proficient in Microsoft Word" is inane? You'd be surprised. My partner's father has probably never used a traditional computer in his entire life, let alone Microsoft Word.

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

#34

Post by mrweasel »

imgabe wrote: post #11
amelius wrote: post #5

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.

Which makes sense, because VERY few people actually knows how to use Word with any significant level of proficiency. I'm guessing more people have advanced Excel skills.

Word is pretty forgiving, for smaller texts, where you could easily go around and fixing heading manually for instance. That leads people to believe that they have "Word skills". I've seen maybe a handful of people being able to seriously utilize Words huge feature set to make their job easier.

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

#36

Post by chris_overseas »

version_five wrote: post #18
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…

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…

There sure is: https://www.fmworldcup.com/excel-as-esports/fmwc-open/

There's also a competition for Office in general: https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/11/22829228/excel-pros-fina...

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

#37

Post by jccalhoun »

johntdaly wrote: post #3

I never understood The New Yorker. This is in humor, is this supposed to be funny?

New Yorker "humor" columns always seem to be more "humorous" than actually funny. You're lucky if you get a smirk from reading one of them.

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

#38

Post by phone8675309 »

deepstack wrote: post #12
johntdaly wrote: post #3

I never understood The New Yorker. This is in humor, is this supposed to be funny?

Yeah The New Yorker always seems pretentious in away how the guy in the bar scene in Good Will Hunting is. Typically cater towards Ivy league educated trust fund crowd.

The running joke about the New Yorker is that you can replace any of their comic captions with "Christ, what an asshole" and they still work.

Honestly, "Christ, what an asshole" is funnier than anything they caption their comics with, so it's a helpful thing to know.

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

#39

Post by ttctciyf »

> Excel’s boundless rectangles yield themselves to my whim as I sort columns and freeze rows like a rational demigod.

I wonder if the author is a "top sheethead," (part of the pro excel scene)? The article doesn't offer an opinion on the controversial Chinese localization fix of 2019[1] for example.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY

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

#40

Post by bitwize »

dzdt wrote: post #14

Inside humor is a kernel of truth, and in the subtle washed-out humor of this article 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. This is a challenge for software development. We are reaching the point now where there are tools like…

> 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 when I became an Emacs user over 25 years ago, with vastly improved functionality, and it's worked that way since long before I started using it. And yet Hackernews, Reddit, and the Emacs mailing lists themselves are awash with people whose only contribution is to declare that Emacs will die unless it is completely overhauled and to look and behave exactly like the poster's favorite current-year IDE. Which was Eclipse 20 years ago, Sublime Text or JetBrains 10 years ago, and VSCode today.

Those other tools come and go, but Emacs is forever. Well, that is, until a successful campaign is launched to convince the world that its current UI is racist, misogynist, ableist, or otherwise harms some marginalized group, and the Emacs maintainership is disbanded and replaced with leaders more respectful of modern ESG guidelines.

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