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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
by 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 agoI 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 agoNo. 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
- bambax 5y agoI have seen people spend (waste) an incredible amount of time readjusting page breaks because they modify something at the start of a document and all the manual empty paragraphs they put here or there don't do what they want anymore. In fact it then becomes an infinite task because every little change breaks everything else. But yes, sure, most Excel users also have no clue you can import data using SQL or that you can set calculation to manual and calculate with F9.
- jamesliudotcc 5y agoYou say this. But 99% of lawyers do not know how to do these things.
- bashinator 5y agoWhat is it about doctors, lawyers, and really really basic computer proficiency?
- Scoundreller 5y agoTheir margins can be high enough to get away without squeezing out every efficiency known to humankind. A cardiologist that pays someone to follow them around all day for the computer stuff makes 5% less than the one that DIYs it all. (And possibly makes up for it in increased billing, but it can slow things down too, especially as the interfaces improve). There’s also a level of smugness about knowing a solution off the top of your head vs. Googling or researching it using subscribed DBs (by yourself or by your “law librarian”). Personally, I’m happy if my doctor googles a solution and goes by a recent review article written by specialists in that area rather than “top of heading” with what they learned in a Continuing Ed session, marketing session or school (if it was long enough ago).
- snowwrestler 5y agoThis is all true, but it’s also true that most job postings that list “proficient with Microsoft Word” don’t usually require using any of these features.
- bambax 5y agoMy point is that they should -- not that everybody needs to be proficient with Word, but that "proficiency" should mean, one knows all or most of these inside and out. Also, using styles and knowing about "keep with next" are really important for any job that involves producing documents.
- AlexCoventry 5y agoThere are a lot of things you can do with a car which I am unqualified to do, yet I still consider myself a proficient driver. Maybe you're mixing up "proficient" and "expert"?
- thomascgalvin 5y ago> Most people don't use styles, or use them improperly, or modify every instance randomly. This is (one of the reasons) why I write everything in Markdown and export it to Word or PDF with Pandoc. There's no temptation to "fix" the formatting as I go along; it's just text, and I can apply a style sheet after the fact.
- bambax 5y agoYeah, well, ironically enough, working like this makes you a very proficient Word user.
- Wistar 5y agoExactly. Pound it in and then paint on the styling. This is very difficult for some to do. I once found my daughter sobbing over a high school writing assignment in Word because her desire to make the paper look perfect as she wrote was causing the document to asplode.
- hesk 5y ago> 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.)
- dhosek 5y agoIf you set the keymap in IntelliJ to MacOS you get many of the Emacs keybindings including ctrl-a/e. I also make these shortcuts for beginning/end of line in Word (although the ability to add custom keyboard shortcuts seems to randomly disappear in my copy of Word).
- hesk 5y agoYes, IntelliJ is easy to fix, just the default is broken. Word, not so much.
- NeutralForest 5y agoI constantly run into this issue when I'm not using Emacs (or Emacs compliant keybindings), it's excessively annoying.
- peatmoss 5y agoEmacs, the lightweight markup format of your choice (org-mode for me), and Pandoc do a pretty good job of creating vanilla Word documents that don't have "weird" formatting embedded. Sadly, it's a one-way trip, and collaborators usually can't be talked into adopting this arcane way of working. But the emacs keybindings work flawlessly :-)
- commandlinefan 5y agoI did a master's thesis using Word, and my thesis advisor got on to me about not taking advantage of all the Word features like styling and proper page-breaking, etc. A few years later I published a book using Word and my publisher demanded that I not use any of the Word "gimmicks" like styling and page-breaking.
- bashinator 5y agoNow I'm curious about what software is used in actual ink-on-dead-trees book publishing.
- commandlinefan 5y agoI submitted everything to them in Word documents (one document per chapter). They converted those to PDFs after having applied a lot of formatting and illustrating and sent me back the PDFs to review. If I found any mistakes, I marked up the PDF and sent it back to be updated and re-reviewed. So probably a lot of Adobe software?
- openknot 5y agoI assume it's Adobe InDesign, from working at a couple student-run publications in college (allows more precise control over how to format text) and one in high school. I hope an industry expert in publishing can chime in, but in the meantime, it looks like professional users in graphic design subreddits mostly use InDesign, followed by Microsoft Publisher [0][1]. Outside of Reddit sources, Creative Bloq also suggests Affinity Publisher and QuarkXPress, but I can't immediately tell if the rankings are paid for or influenced by advertisers [2]. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Affinity/comments/gdqrux/thinking_of_switching_from_indesign_to_publisher/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Affinity/comments/gdqrux/thinking_o... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/7p9s8q/should_i_be_using_publisher_or_word/ https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/7p9s8q/shou... [2] https://www.creativebloq.com/buying-guides/best-desktop-publishing-software https://www.creativebloq.com/buying-guides/best-desktop-publ...
- bambax 5y ago
- solarkraft 5y ago> Most people don't use styles, or use them improperly, or modify every instance randomly. To be fair to people who don't know (I agree that it's an important skill): It's kind of Word's fault. Direct formatting is easy while proper styling is hard and undiscoverable AF. People would probably immediately get it if the difficulties were reversed.
- bthallplz 5y ago> They are very surprised to learn you can type in italics directly using underscores. What does this mean? I'm not finding it on Google.
- bambax 5y agoType an underscore, type your word, or a sequence of words, type another underscore (no space before): the word is in italics. Works with stars/asterisks for bold. Much faster than selecting what you want to highlight, and clicking on the appropriate icon or even doing CTRL+I/B.
- pxx 5y agoHow in the world is this faster than ctrl-i? It's the same number of keystrokes and _ is further away than i. If you're annoyed about how far Ctrl is, maybe you should have the key left of 'a' bound to it. Also you don't want to be using ad-hoc styling in Word to begin with. It's definitely an anti-pattern.
- bambax 5y agoIt's faster because you don't have to stop to select the text, you just type continuously.
- ncmncm 5y agoTo be fair: MSWord itself seems to know very little about ToC or ToC formatting. And pagination. And page numbering. The best that can be said for it is that it succeeds often enough that people do not all abandon it.
- noitsnot 5y agoBasically, you have an MBA.
- rdtwo 5y agoGood 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
- Consultant32452 5y agoI spent an hour with a coworker last week trying to figure out how to remove the change history from a Word doc. We're both highly technical.
- RajBhai 5y agoProbably 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.
- 3pt14159 5y agoTwo 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.
- jmrm 5y agoIt's funny how last time I used mail merge I was using Office 200o in Windows Me. I'm pretty curious about how many people use this kind of tools today.