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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

#81

Post by Mezzie »

bluedino wrote: post #62

The amount of calls that come to the helpdesks around the world, that are caused by people not knowing anything about Word/Excel is astounding. In the old days of office applications you needed to know all the keystrokes and macros and control codes. Remember the keyboard overlays you could buy for each word processor/spreadsheet? You basically had to be an expert to be proficient. Then they went and dumbed it down,…

> The amount of calls that come to the helpdesks around the world, that are caused by people not knowing anything about Word/Excel is astounding.

Haha, never go work in a public library or at a school/college, especially in a poor area. The amount of times I had to tell some poor student near tears that their professor/school/work/whoever had effed up was too high.

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

#82

Post by mabub24 »

unixhero wrote: post #78
egypturnash wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The publishing industry runs on Word, according to my writer acquaintances. You may write your book in something better designed for big complex text projects such as Scrivener, but it’s gotta turn into Word when it goes to them, and stays Word through all the editing process.

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, typed manuscripts often have little to no formatting anyway. They are essentially using Word as a "plain" text editor with red-lining built in.

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

#83

Post by dachryn »

GlennS wrote: post #25
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 don't know how Microsoft could possibly make pivot tables easier. You can easily learn the basics in half an hour's experimental clicking. But, I've had a client explicitly request that a report in Excel shouldn't include pivot tables, because they're too difficult. Too difficult to even look at.

I honestly love the google sheets implementation. I never have to lookup the syntax again, or remember exactly which things does what. I only use pivot tables like 5 times a year. So I dont have every step always ready in my mind

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

tpoacher wrote: post #67
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…

> Seeing "Proficient with Microsoft Office" on a CV for me is a bit of a red flag; highlighting another job skill is probably a better use of space, at the very least. Well, it shouldn't. The candidate does not know what kind of checkbox exercise their CV ends up on, so they should not be penalized for trying to cover weird edge-cases. True story: I once applied for a 'ranked' job which needed me to "prove" IT skills…

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by rdtwo »

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.

Good luck getting references to stay in word after changes. Or using features like splitting off and merging sections of an outline. Word sucks for large reference documents and constantly breaks its very much like it’s still 1997 and shit breaks for no obvious reason

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

#88

Post by hesk »

bambax wrote: post #31
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.

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.)

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

#89

Post by SkyPuncher »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #33
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.

But, would your father be applying for a computer centric job?

That's where the insanity comes from. You get places adding these types of requirements to computer-centric jobs like programming, software design, analytics, etc.

Many of them are simply placeholders.

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

#90

Post by commandlinefan »

This article is funny, but I actually did sit down one weekend and read a book on Word (I think it was Word 2007). I was actually shocked at how complex and sophisticated a word-processing tool could get. Even back then there were a lot of surprisingly useful features like footnote processing and multi-document support that I never even would have thought of looking for.
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