19 ms·

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

134 points by opdahl 5y ago

DonBarredora 5y ago
Is this supposed to be funny?
SJJINO 5y ago
Yeah, thats cool i know very well about MS Office and sth, i think we are all in the same stage of link with Nowadays Microsoft is part of our life. And it's growing and like we also.
azalemeth 5y ago
I cannot tell you how unproductive 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 in Overleaf with me -- only biochemists). Writing a paper in Word is like pulling nasal hair out through the back of my throat. It's eminently possible to do it. Millions of people around the world do. Yet it is death by a thousand tiny, frustrating cuts. From the fact that the keyboard shortcuts are not those of the rest of the operating system (on MacOS or Linux on the online app -- e.g. ctrl+shift+arrow keys to highlight text works differently in Word to every other OS) to the fact that opening the paper, writing something, closing it, and re-opening it doesn't necessarily get you the same bloody document. I was editing something last night (from a biologist -- who had done MRI on Burmese pythons – alas the reconstruction was done in matlab and not python!) and each time I saved, my "tracked changes" went from displaying my name to "Author". I forget the number of times I've seen "Unknown field code changed" on the right hand side. If you want to work with references from many people, forget about it. LaTeX has literally none of these problems. Sure, it has a lot of other problems, but none of these ones. I just can't stand using Word; it is inconsistent, slow, and incorrectly second-guesses you. I'm not saying that everyone and their grandparents should use LaTeX, but the disparity -- and the comparative rareness of alternatives, outside of inDesign and Quark in the professional publishing scene -- does deeply worry me. Office is one of those areas where the Microsoft strangehold is strongest. And it's objectively a bad experience! 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.
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  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.
- jabroni_salad 5y ago
  >mucho texto OK, but what if your applicant had this in his CV? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlX_pThh7z8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlX_pThh7z8
- tpoacher 5y ago
  > 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. By that point I had a masters in advanced computer science (with specialization in machine learning). The scoring for the job went as follows: - Demonstrates IT skills proficiency via European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL): 2 points - Demonstrates IT skills proficiency via other means: 1 point. - No IT skills demonstrated: 0 points. I scored 1 point. Given the competitive nature of this process, apparently that single point cost me about 1000 places down in the rankings, so I got none of the positions that interested me the most. According to the infinite wisdom of the recruitment checklist, being able to program your own word suite was pittance compared to being able to type in one. I literally had to drag my ass to the nearest public library, subscribe to, and actually ATTEND (due to mandatory attendance) an ECDL course for the next 6 months, just so I could score more highly in the next round of job applications.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- zdw 5y ago
  The fundamental problem is that all of Office was designed for a different time, and irredeemably sucks at two things: * True version control and useful change tracking of content * Intercompatability of formats with other tools If we could get away from v2,v3,v4 suffixes on files, and your data basically going into those Roach Motels of file formats, maybe it could become worthwhile someday. For now, it's just a vomitous throwback to the bad old 90's software design mechanics.
hilbert42 5y ago
Oh my God, now tell us how you navigate the bugs.
johntdaly 5y ago
I never understood The New Yorker. This is in humor, is this supposed to be funny?
- francisofascii 5y ago
  A "Proficient in HTML" title might be more funny to the HN crowd.
- alexb_ 5y ago
  - pfortuny 5y ago
    Just a piece of unsolicited advice: do not reply personally. Take your time and let people just say their thing and leave it at that. It is not so important.
- d--b 5y ago
  If it's humor, then I am definitely a target of ridicule, cause I read the stuff thinking: ha! He doesn't even know about Styles, Outlines and Sections.
- deepstack 5y ago
  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.
  - arepublicadoceu 5y ago
    Well, I’m as far removed from a Ivy League education as one can be and I found this quite funny. But I’m also someone who uses Word since early 00s and can relate a lot to this text.
  - phone8675309 5y ago
    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.
amelius 5y ago
This is nerd-shaming, and just as bad as other types of shaming.
- modernpink 5y ago
  No self respecting 'nerd' would be using Word.
  - tentacleuno 5y ago
    Isn't this comment nerd-shaming? I use LibreOffice Writer (and sometimes Word) quite frequently, and I consider myself somewhat of a nerd.
    - catach 5y ago
      Is nerd-gatekeeping the same thing as nerd-shaming?
- imgabe 5y ago
  I don’t see it as nerd shaming. It seems to be more poking fun at the skills people list on their résumés.
  - probably_wrong 5y ago
    I agree with you that it's probably not nerd shaming. Having said that, I read it as poking fun at the skills people are expected/forced to list on their CVs. "M.Sc. in Software Engineering. 15 years of software development experience. Successful founder of two startups. Other skills: E-mail, Word, Excel, Powerpoint". In any case, and seeing how varied the comments here are, I officially label it "art".
    - bqmjjx0kac 5y ago
      I am surprised by the number of people completely missing the piece's tone! I wonder if the folks seeing nerd shaming are being thrown off by the Napoleon-Dynamite-esque photo.
OccamsRazr 5y ago
This is a disappointing version of something much funnier that would be found in McSweeney's.
imgabe 5y ago
https://archive.is/BABPG https://archive.is/BABPG
culturestate 5y ago
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 other hand, I wouldn't mind if people started flagging "knows how to use pivot tables in Excel..."
- auxym 5y ago
  Powerquery is a much more powerful alternative to pivot tables in modern excel. For one thing, you can chain queries, SQL style. IE, you can use the table that is the result of a query as input to another query.
- version_five 5y ago
  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 it than knowing that you can type words and change their font as in the article.
  - user3939382 5y ago
    Reading your comment I remembered the guy who implemented 3D doom in Excel https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/3d-engine-entirely-made-of-ms-excel-formulae-enjoy-this-doom-xls-file- https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/3d-engine-entirely-made...
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    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.
dzdt 5y ago
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 Microsoft Word which have been available with recognizable continuity for 30+ years. But even it isn't clear the right business model for software which is intended for a decades-lasting long term stable release. Is it the Office 365 subscription? Copyleft open source?
- bitwize 5y ago
  > 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.
  - ogogmad 5y ago
    Emacs is criticised for its very steep learning curve, not just for being different.
    - frosted-flakes 5y ago
dmitriid 5y ago
This an attempt at humor, and very inept at that. I would, however, welcome an article that explained the difference between being proficient or event competent at Word and claiming you are. I spent a lot of time as a high schooler and as a student working with Word. Even today, 20 years later and with Google Docs I routinely use "arcane knowledge" like setting tab stops in the ruler which looks like magic to many friends who never had to work with Word.
JackFr 5y ago
Don’t overthink it people Take thirty seconds to read it. Smirk. Or don't. Then move on.
analog31 5y ago
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. Or PowerPoint. Of course the programmers have switched to Markdown or comment-free code. The main remaining uses for Word seem to be documents that nobody reads.
- usrusr 5y ago
  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.
  - analog31 5y ago
    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.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  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.
  - unixhero 5y ago
    What about LaTeX?
nathias 5y ago
Word is a solution looking for a problem. It exists because of MS wormed itself into public systems around the globe, and it became the standard for writing and publishing. It does both of those tasks horribly compared to any alternatives (markdown, latex).
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Alt-T-L, mofos.
d--b 5y ago
Oooooooh I get it. It’s a joke about how writers should advertise writer skills rather than word skills. Maybe…
ttctciyf 5y ago
> 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY
pwned1 5y ago
Well, I'll just come out and say it. I love Word. Always have. I love Windows too. There.
irrational 5y ago
I’m not sure I’m proficient at Word. I’ve used word processors for decades, but I stopped using them on a regular basis after college (mid to late 90s). Back then I used Word Perfect. Since then I’ve only needed to use one a few times a year. And never anything more complicated than something like a super simple sign with large letters. I find Word to be complicated when I try to use it. Why are the menus constantly changing? How does anyone find anything when they change so often?
- ogogmad 5y ago
  Coming from the half-broken, arcane user interfaces of the programming world, GUI interfaces like the one Word has are a piece of cake. Even if you haven't used these programs for years -- and have largely missed their repeated UI overhauls -- the interfaces are so discoverable that you can learn the latest iteration of these programs without reading a book or looking anything up. I sometimes suspect that there's a large subset of programmers who are irrationally snobby and elitist towards discoverable UX.
hyperman1 5y ago
A contractor billed us for some work. He opened the laptop, filled in item prices and item counts as we requested. All of this in a very nice excel template. Then he took his cellphone calculator app, multiplied counts with prices, filling in the subtotals in the excel sheet. Another round of the calculator summed these to a grand total, and a final round calculated taxes. Both were dutifully typed in at the bottom of the excel sheet. I died a little that day.
- mauvehaus 5y ago
  Futurama nails it once again? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jMG1D8XeLDA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jMG1D8XeLDA
- agumonkey 5y ago
  don't ever step in any office you will evaporate every job I had was filled with endless streams of redundancy of this kind I even consider the public sector a state wide incarnation of this principle
bluedino 5y ago
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, adding menus, buttons, giving everyone mice, the power of WYSIWYG. Now every idiot in the office could print out a mispelled sign about keeping the counters clean in 48 point comic sans, print it in landscape and tape it to the microwave. Microsoft continues to screw stuff up by adding things like 'Reading Mode'. I've seen office staff brought to tears when a document is automatically opened in reading mode by a middle manager who thinks that matches the print layout, and lays into them about how it looks. These days you unknowingly launch a document in Word for the web and it's in read-only mode because of Sharepoint permissions that aren't clear, so you can't toggle the checkboxes and it takes 3 co-workers to figure out what went wrong.
- Mezzie 5y ago
  > 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.
Damogran6 5y ago
I can wield and control tens of thousands of systems and bend them to do my bidding. But my inability in Office Products is my biggest source of impostor syndrome stress. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to keep snapping to the beginning and end of a really long column in Excel, trying to see what’s in the middle.
Jenz 5y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20220121101822/https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/i-cannot-begin-to-tell-you-how-proficient-i-am-in-microsoft-word https://web.archive.org/web/20220121101822/https://www.newyo...
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Requirements: 5+ years italicizing text. 3+ years using Arial and Helvetica. “I’ve used Tahoma for 7 years.” “Sorry, that’s not really what we’re looking for. Now, please draw a capital ‘A’ in Times Roman on the whiteboard.” “…” (applicant realizes they should’ve spent more time on LeetWord.com)
raman162 5y ago
Loved the humor in this article, In a way I feel like that's how me and markdown are right now. I probably spend 25% of my computer time jotting down stuff in markdown documents.
leodriesch 5y ago
I think newyorker.com is the most beautiful news site out there. The typography is just awesome, nice to read on mobile aswell!
instagraham 5y ago
I formatted an entire book in Word once. Even though this was early in my career and something I may have wanted on my CV, I never spoke of it again. Never again.
commandlinefan 5y ago
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.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Two satires from The New Yorker on HN front page in one day! This should have been about Excel. I see way more puffery surrounding Excel than I do Word.
pmdulaney 5y ago
I like it! Even the title made me chuckle...
octokatt 5y ago
… Anyone else remember Microsoft Works? I remember liking it a lot more because it was a little faster. The article talked about using Microsoft Word in Windows 95, and all I could think of was Microsoft Works.
contextfree 5y ago
I recommend the "How to REALLY use Microsoft Office" video tutorial series from Scott Hanselman: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0M0zPgJ3HSeTcj_bH9ulOyAGixWV8lQB https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0M0zPgJ3HSeTcj_bH9ul...
asdff 5y ago
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.
mickotron 5y ago
If I never had to touch Microsoft Word ever again in my career, that will be nice.

134 points by opdahl 5y ago

Is this supposed to be funny?

Yeah, thats cool i know very well about MS Office and sth, i think we are all in the same stage of link with Nowadays Microsoft is part of our life. And it's growing and like we also.

azalemeth 5y ago

I cannot tell you how unproductive 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 in Overleaf with me -- only biochemists). Writing a paper in Word is like pulling nasal hair out through the back of my throat. It's eminently possible to do it. Millions of people around the world do. Yet it is death by a thousand tiny, frustrating cuts. From the fact that the keyboard shortcuts are not those of the rest of the operating system (on MacOS or Linux on the online app -- e.g. ctrl+shift+arrow keys to highlight text works differently in Word to every other OS) to the fact that opening the paper, writing something, closing it, and re-opening it doesn't necessarily get you the same bloody document. I was editing something last night (from a biologist -- who had done MRI on Burmese pythons – alas the reconstruction was done in matlab and not python!) and each time I saved, my "tracked changes" went from displaying my name to "Author". I forget the number of times I've seen "Unknown field code changed" on the right hand side. If you want to work with references from many people, forget about it. LaTeX has literally none of these problems. Sure, it has a lot of other problems, but none of these ones. I just can't stand using Word; it is inconsistent, slow, and incorrectly second-guesses you. I'm not saying that everyone and their grandparents should use LaTeX, but the disparity -- and the comparative rareness of alternatives, outside of inDesign and Quark in the professional publishing scene -- does deeply worry me. Office is one of those areas where the Microsoft strangehold is strongest. And it's objectively a bad experience! 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.

benhurmarcel 5y ago
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.
jabroni_salad 5y ago
>mucho texto OK, but what if your applicant had this in his CV? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlX_pThh7z8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlX_pThh7z8
tpoacher 5y ago
> 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. By that point I had a masters in advanced computer science (with specialization in machine learning). The scoring for the job went as follows: - Demonstrates IT skills proficiency via European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL): 2 points - Demonstrates IT skills proficiency via other means: 1 point. - No IT skills demonstrated: 0 points. I scored 1 point. Given the competitive nature of this process, apparently that single point cost me about 1000 places down in the rankings, so I got none of the positions that interested me the most. According to the infinite wisdom of the recruitment checklist, being able to program your own word suite was pittance compared to being able to type in one. I literally had to drag my ass to the nearest public library, subscribe to, and actually ATTEND (due to mandatory attendance) an ECDL course for the next 6 months, just so I could score more highly in the next round of job applications.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
zdw 5y ago
The fundamental problem is that all of Office was designed for a different time, and irredeemably sucks at two things: * True version control and useful change tracking of content * Intercompatability of formats with other tools If we could get away from v2,v3,v4 suffixes on files, and your data basically going into those Roach Motels of file formats, maybe it could become worthwhile someday. For now, it's just a vomitous throwback to the bad old 90's software design mechanics.

hilbert42 5y ago

Oh my God, now tell us how you navigate the bugs.

johntdaly 5y ago

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

francisofascii 5y ago
A "Proficient in HTML" title might be more funny to the HN crowd.
alexb_ 5y ago
- pfortuny 5y ago
  Just a piece of unsolicited advice: do not reply personally. Take your time and let people just say their thing and leave it at that. It is not so important.
d--b 5y ago
If it's humor, then I am definitely a target of ridicule, cause I read the stuff thinking: ha! He doesn't even know about Styles, Outlines and Sections.
deepstack 5y ago
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.
- arepublicadoceu 5y ago
  Well, I’m as far removed from a Ivy League education as one can be and I found this quite funny. But I’m also someone who uses Word since early 00s and can relate a lot to this text.
- phone8675309 5y ago
  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.

amelius 5y ago

This is nerd-shaming, and just as bad as other types of shaming.

modernpink 5y ago
No self respecting 'nerd' would be using Word.
- tentacleuno 5y ago
  Isn't this comment nerd-shaming? I use LibreOffice Writer (and sometimes Word) quite frequently, and I consider myself somewhat of a nerd.
  - catach 5y ago
    Is nerd-gatekeeping the same thing as nerd-shaming?
imgabe 5y ago
I don’t see it as nerd shaming. It seems to be more poking fun at the skills people list on their résumés.
- probably_wrong 5y ago
  I agree with you that it's probably not nerd shaming. Having said that, I read it as poking fun at the skills people are expected/forced to list on their CVs. "M.Sc. in Software Engineering. 15 years of software development experience. Successful founder of two startups. Other skills: E-mail, Word, Excel, Powerpoint". In any case, and seeing how varied the comments here are, I officially label it "art".
  - bqmjjx0kac 5y ago
    I am surprised by the number of people completely missing the piece's tone! I wonder if the folks seeing nerd shaming are being thrown off by the Napoleon-Dynamite-esque photo.

OccamsRazr 5y ago

This is a disappointing version of something much funnier that would be found in McSweeney's.

imgabe 5y ago

https://archive.is/BABPG https://archive.is/BABPG

culturestate 5y ago

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 other hand, I wouldn't mind if people started flagging "knows how to use pivot tables in Excel..."

auxym 5y ago
Powerquery is a much more powerful alternative to pivot tables in modern excel. For one thing, you can chain queries, SQL style. IE, you can use the table that is the result of a query as input to another query.
version_five 5y ago
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 it than knowing that you can type words and change their font as in the article.
- user3939382 5y ago
  Reading your comment I remembered the guy who implemented 3D doom in Excel https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/3d-engine-entirely-made-of-ms-excel-formulae-enjoy-this-doom-xls-file- https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/3d-engine-entirely-made...
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  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.

dzdt 5y ago

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 Microsoft Word which have been available with recognizable continuity for 30+ years. But even it isn't clear the right business model for software which is intended for a decades-lasting long term stable release. Is it the Office 365 subscription? Copyleft open source?

bitwize 5y ago
> 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.
- ogogmad 5y ago
  Emacs is criticised for its very steep learning curve, not just for being different.
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago

dmitriid 5y ago

This an attempt at humor, and very inept at that. I would, however, welcome an article that explained the difference between being proficient or event competent at Word and claiming you are. I spent a lot of time as a high schooler and as a student working with Word. Even today, 20 years later and with Google Docs I routinely use "arcane knowledge" like setting tab stops in the ruler which looks like magic to many friends who never had to work with Word.

JackFr 5y ago

Don’t overthink it people Take thirty seconds to read it. Smirk. Or don't. Then move on.

analog31 5y ago

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. Or PowerPoint. Of course the programmers have switched to Markdown or comment-free code. The main remaining uses for Word seem to be documents that nobody reads.

usrusr 5y ago
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.
- analog31 5y ago
  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.
egypturnash 5y ago
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.
- unixhero 5y ago
  What about LaTeX?

nathias 5y ago

Word is a solution looking for a problem. It exists because of MS wormed itself into public systems around the globe, and it became the standard for writing and publishing. It does both of those tasks horribly compared to any alternatives (markdown, latex).

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

Alt-T-L, mofos.

d--b 5y ago

Oooooooh I get it. It’s a joke about how writers should advertise writer skills rather than word skills. Maybe…

ttctciyf 5y ago

> 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY

pwned1 5y ago

Well, I'll just come out and say it. I love Word. Always have. I love Windows too. There.

irrational 5y ago

I’m not sure I’m proficient at Word. I’ve used word processors for decades, but I stopped using them on a regular basis after college (mid to late 90s). Back then I used Word Perfect. Since then I’ve only needed to use one a few times a year. And never anything more complicated than something like a super simple sign with large letters. I find Word to be complicated when I try to use it. Why are the menus constantly changing? How does anyone find anything when they change so often?

ogogmad 5y ago
Coming from the half-broken, arcane user interfaces of the programming world, GUI interfaces like the one Word has are a piece of cake. Even if you haven't used these programs for years -- and have largely missed their repeated UI overhauls -- the interfaces are so discoverable that you can learn the latest iteration of these programs without reading a book or looking anything up. I sometimes suspect that there's a large subset of programmers who are irrationally snobby and elitist towards discoverable UX.

hyperman1 5y ago

A contractor billed us for some work. He opened the laptop, filled in item prices and item counts as we requested. All of this in a very nice excel template. Then he took his cellphone calculator app, multiplied counts with prices, filling in the subtotals in the excel sheet. Another round of the calculator summed these to a grand total, and a final round calculated taxes. Both were dutifully typed in at the bottom of the excel sheet. I died a little that day.

mauvehaus 5y ago
Futurama nails it once again? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jMG1D8XeLDA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jMG1D8XeLDA
agumonkey 5y ago
don't ever step in any office you will evaporate every job I had was filled with endless streams of redundancy of this kind I even consider the public sector a state wide incarnation of this principle

bluedino 5y ago

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, adding menus, buttons, giving everyone mice, the power of WYSIWYG. Now every idiot in the office could print out a mispelled sign about keeping the counters clean in 48 point comic sans, print it in landscape and tape it to the microwave. Microsoft continues to screw stuff up by adding things like 'Reading Mode'. I've seen office staff brought to tears when a document is automatically opened in reading mode by a middle manager who thinks that matches the print layout, and lays into them about how it looks. These days you unknowingly launch a document in Word for the web and it's in read-only mode because of Sharepoint permissions that aren't clear, so you can't toggle the checkboxes and it takes 3 co-workers to figure out what went wrong.

Mezzie 5y ago
> 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.

Damogran6 5y ago

I can wield and control tens of thousands of systems and bend them to do my bidding. But my inability in Office Products is my biggest source of impostor syndrome stress. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to keep snapping to the beginning and end of a really long column in Excel, trying to see what’s in the middle.

Jenz 5y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220121101822/https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/i-cannot-begin-to-tell-you-how-proficient-i-am-in-microsoft-word https://web.archive.org/web/20220121101822/https://www.newyo...

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

Requirements: 5+ years italicizing text. 3+ years using Arial and Helvetica. “I’ve used Tahoma for 7 years.” “Sorry, that’s not really what we’re looking for. Now, please draw a capital ‘A’ in Times Roman on the whiteboard.” “…” (applicant realizes they should’ve spent more time on LeetWord.com)

raman162 5y ago

Loved the humor in this article, In a way I feel like that's how me and markdown are right now. I probably spend 25% of my computer time jotting down stuff in markdown documents.

leodriesch 5y ago

I think newyorker.com is the most beautiful news site out there. The typography is just awesome, nice to read on mobile aswell!

instagraham 5y ago

I formatted an entire book in Word once. Even though this was early in my career and something I may have wanted on my CV, I never spoke of it again. Never again.

commandlinefan 5y ago

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.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

Two satires from The New Yorker on HN front page in one day! This should have been about Excel. I see way more puffery surrounding Excel than I do Word.

pmdulaney 5y ago

I like it! Even the title made me chuckle...

octokatt 5y ago

… Anyone else remember Microsoft Works? I remember liking it a lot more because it was a little faster. The article talked about using Microsoft Word in Windows 95, and all I could think of was Microsoft Works.

contextfree 5y ago

I recommend the "How to REALLY use Microsoft Office" video tutorial series from Scott Hanselman: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0M0zPgJ3HSeTcj_bH9ulOyAGixWV8lQB https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0M0zPgJ3HSeTcj_bH9ul...

asdff 5y ago

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.

mickotron 5y ago

If I never had to touch Microsoft Word ever again in my career, that will be nice.