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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 r

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.
  - beerandt 5y ago
    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.
  - bambax 5y ago
    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.
    - 3pt14159 5y ago
      > Alignments. Bullets, bullet types. Margins. Sections. I mean, for white collar work this is the equivalent of making sure someone knows how to use a semi-colon. It's a "skill" in scarequotes because basic proficiency is assumed and 99% of the time you don't need things to be pixel perfect and if you do you can figure it out on the fly. Compare these things to, say, knowing when and how to use Excel Solver to give a non-inferior solution set. Or fiddling around to integrate remote data feeds into a sheet for daily automation.
      - wlesieutre 5y ago
        > 99% of the time you don't need things to be pixel perfect and if you do you can figure it out on the fly You can figure it out on the fly, not everyone has that reaction to unfamiliar software
- chris_overseas 5y ago
  There sure is: https://www.fmworldcup.com/excel-as-esports/fmwc-open/ 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-financial-modeling-world-cup https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/11/22829228/excel-pros-fina...
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    I've tried watching their latest videos and it was frustrating and weird. You see people toying with excel and somehow they manage to answer the game questions but you don't understand what they do. Often they fail and you don't know why either.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  I once needed to pivot a table. Tried it with excel, spent an hour googling, couldn't get it to work. Then exported it into SQL server, googled how to do it in T-sql, and was done shortly after. Respect for people who work with excel, but it's not for me.
  - moron123 5y ago
    Roughly, Step 1: Insert pivot table Step 2: Set data source Step 3: set row (pivots) Step 4: set value (summary)
Siira 5y ago
“Must know ten flavors of Markdown”
GlennS 5y ago
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.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  That goes to show that the difficulty is not on the software's UI.
- toyg 5y ago
  Half the problem is knowing what the word "pivot" means in the context of data. Had they picked a less-formal description, I reckon they would be more popular.
- dachryn 5y ago
  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
suifbwish 5y ago
What about “can programmatically generate word documents and xlsx files in Python”
- Kon-Peki 5y ago
  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 tab with 90+ million rows, and a Go program will run circles around the equivalent Python program :)
  - suifbwish 5y ago
    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.
    - Kon-Peki 5y ago
      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.
ballenf 5y ago
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.
- wizwit999 5y ago
  that's kinda fascinating, what's an example
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
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.
- SkyPuncher 5y ago
  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.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    No, he wouldn't be. You make a good point but even still, I have seen software engineers struggle to do anything outside of the well-worn groove that they've been riding in for the last 20 years.
- pram 5y ago
  Yeah I've never used it, I was taught in school to make documents in ClarisWorks lol. I've only ever used AbiWord and Pages after that.
csydas 5y ago
It goes both ways. Office is both an expectation on postings that don't actually know how to assess technical knowledge so the creator(s) of the postings just make up whatever is tough for them and also seems like it's a highly technical skill. At the same time for fairly highly technical roles I see persons frequently adding not just Office as a skill but each of the office apps without further detail. For me when a candidate for more high level roles advertises their office skills, I see it as a negative usually. It's not an immediate mark against, but I do end up with lower expectations on the tech I am interested in. If the role isnt oriented towards heavily doing office work, I'm not that interested in Office. I have the same feeling about when someone lists Linux experience and mentioned Kali as their distro; unless they're a security specialist usually it means they played with Kali in a college crash course/intro network security course, and only know a few specific applications + flags to get some result for a network pen test. Hiring is really hard because in general it's difficult to describe the domain that most jobs encompass unless it already had a narrow focus. Maybe it's not true anymore but I seem to recall if you ask 10 people what DevOps is you'll get 12 different answers, all of them disagreeing. This gets even worse for general tech roles that are basically low level system troubleshooting positions. It's hard for those doing the job to really summarize their day to day in a series of core tasks, and it's even harder for non-technical persons to even know what to ask the technical persons to build a proper posting. I've only worked with one good Recruiter team and they are so good they convinced me that recruiters can be not just good, but excellent, and I'll defend any such blanket statements lumping all recruiters together. But it is a skill like any other, and it's not something you can do by passively writing buzzword copy on LinkedIn. For me the article is a satire of modern hiring in general, whether highly technical or not. It's a response to an imagined dedicated question about proficiency in Word for a highly skilled position, and it's poking fun on why such a skill that should be a given now for modern professional business is given so much attention still. No one (should) be doing tons of design in Word for the business. It's fine for collaborative notepad with office365 and as a generic "okay" looking document, but just like I hope my candidates don't need help with stuff like putting their socks on or brushing their teeth, I expect they can punch out a relatively okay looking document in word and make a simple spreadsheet in excel and know that PowerPoint exists
seanccox 5y ago
Yeah, it's satire in the 'humor' section of the New Yorker.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Pivot tables are so 1990's. Vector functions (you have to press three keys at once!) and 2D table solvers are all the rage. Get with the hip crowd. /s

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.
- beerandt 5y ago
  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.
- bambax 5y ago
  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.
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    > Alignments. Bullets, bullet types. Margins. Sections. I mean, for white collar work this is the equivalent of making sure someone knows how to use a semi-colon. It's a "skill" in scarequotes because basic proficiency is assumed and 99% of the time you don't need things to be pixel perfect and if you do you can figure it out on the fly. Compare these things to, say, knowing when and how to use Excel Solver to give a non-inferior solution set. Or fiddling around to integrate remote data feeds into a sheet for daily automation.
    - wlesieutre 5y ago
      > 99% of the time you don't need things to be pixel perfect and if you do you can figure it out on the fly You can figure it out on the fly, not everyone has that reaction to unfamiliar software
chris_overseas 5y ago
There sure is: https://www.fmworldcup.com/excel-as-esports/fmwc-open/ 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-financial-modeling-world-cup https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/11/22829228/excel-pros-fina...
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I've tried watching their latest videos and it was frustrating and weird. You see people toying with excel and somehow they manage to answer the game questions but you don't understand what they do. Often they fail and you don't know why either.
Semaphor 5y ago
I once needed to pivot a table. Tried it with excel, spent an hour googling, couldn't get it to work. Then exported it into SQL server, googled how to do it in T-sql, and was done shortly after. Respect for people who work with excel, but it's not for me.
- moron123 5y ago
  Roughly, Step 1: Insert pivot table Step 2: Set data source Step 3: set row (pivots) Step 4: set value (summary)

Siira 5y ago

“Must know ten flavors of Markdown”

GlennS 5y ago

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.

marcosdumay 5y ago
That goes to show that the difficulty is not on the software's UI.
toyg 5y ago
Half the problem is knowing what the word "pivot" means in the context of data. Had they picked a less-formal description, I reckon they would be more popular.
dachryn 5y ago
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

suifbwish 5y ago

What about “can programmatically generate word documents and xlsx files in Python”

Kon-Peki 5y ago
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 tab with 90+ million rows, and a Go program will run circles around the equivalent Python program :)
- suifbwish 5y ago
  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.
  - Kon-Peki 5y ago
    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.

ballenf 5y ago

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.

wizwit999 5y ago
that's kinda fascinating, what's an example

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

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.

SkyPuncher 5y ago
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.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  No, he wouldn't be. You make a good point but even still, I have seen software engineers struggle to do anything outside of the well-worn groove that they've been riding in for the last 20 years.
pram 5y ago
Yeah I've never used it, I was taught in school to make documents in ClarisWorks lol. I've only ever used AbiWord and Pages after that.

csydas 5y ago

It goes both ways. Office is both an expectation on postings that don't actually know how to assess technical knowledge so the creator(s) of the postings just make up whatever is tough for them and also seems like it's a highly technical skill. At the same time for fairly highly technical roles I see persons frequently adding not just Office as a skill but each of the office apps without further detail. For me when a candidate for more high level roles advertises their office skills, I see it as a negative usually. It's not an immediate mark against, but I do end up with lower expectations on the tech I am interested in. If the role isnt oriented towards heavily doing office work, I'm not that interested in Office. I have the same feeling about when someone lists Linux experience and mentioned Kali as their distro; unless they're a security specialist usually it means they played with Kali in a college crash course/intro network security course, and only know a few specific applications + flags to get some result for a network pen test. Hiring is really hard because in general it's difficult to describe the domain that most jobs encompass unless it already had a narrow focus. Maybe it's not true anymore but I seem to recall if you ask 10 people what DevOps is you'll get 12 different answers, all of them disagreeing. This gets even worse for general tech roles that are basically low level system troubleshooting positions. It's hard for those doing the job to really summarize their day to day in a series of core tasks, and it's even harder for non-technical persons to even know what to ask the technical persons to build a proper posting. I've only worked with one good Recruiter team and they are so good they convinced me that recruiters can be not just good, but excellent, and I'll defend any such blanket statements lumping all recruiters together. But it is a skill like any other, and it's not something you can do by passively writing buzzword copy on LinkedIn. For me the article is a satire of modern hiring in general, whether highly technical or not. It's a response to an imagined dedicated question about proficiency in Word for a highly skilled position, and it's poking fun on why such a skill that should be a given now for modern professional business is given so much attention still. No one (should) be doing tons of design in Word for the business. It's fine for collaborative notepad with office365 and as a generic "okay" looking document, but just like I hope my candidates don't need help with stuff like putting their socks on or brushing their teeth, I expect they can punch out a relatively okay looking document in word and make a simple spreadsheet in excel and know that PowerPoint exists

seanccox 5y ago

Yeah, it's satire in the 'humor' section of the New Yorker.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

SavantIdiot 5y ago

Pivot tables are so 1990's. Vector functions (you have to press three keys at once!) and 2D table solvers are all the rage. Get with the hip crowd. /s