scott wrote:
>> You're right. My place of work isn't the real world at all.
> 
> Exactly, you seem to base your assumptions of how the whole world uses 
> Word based on how the people in your company use it.  You regularly 
> present lots of evidence about how screwed up IT is in your company, so 
> don't you think that there might actually be other companies out there 
> that are a tad more organised in this sort of thing?

The people who work in IT are pretty screwed up. The regular users at 
the UK site are just normal people trying to get their job done. In 
particular, we have two report writers who spend practically their 
entire way working with M$ Word and do almost nothing else.

>> As an aside, at work we try to avoid document templates to the maximum 
>> extent possible because they cause Word to crash.
> 
> See, it's comments like that that really show a completely screwed up IT 
> mentality.

> Does it not occur to you that something else might have been 
> causing the crashes, given that it is likely millions of people actually 
> do use templates daily without Word crashing?

I'm still waiting to see hard evidence that "millions of people actually 
do use templates without Word crashing".

Word's tendancy to crash at the slightest provocation is the stuff of 
legend, to the point that nobody even bothers to *try* to fix it any 
more. We just placidly accept that if you use Word it *will* crash, and 
there's essentially nothing you can do about it.

> How on Earth do you keep 
> consistent looking documents without using templates?

Hint: It's very slow and tedious.

(Actually, I didn't say we *don't* use templates. I said we *avoid* 
using them. Some customers demand that we use the templates they supply. 
 From what I understand, some of these templates work OK, and others 
cause endless crashes, much to the frustration of people trying to get 
their job done...)

> Don't you think 
> it would be headline news on every IT website if nobody could use 
> document templates without Word crashing?  Don't you think MS would 
> release a fix straight away if there was such a problem?

I thought it *was* headline news that Word is cripplingly unreliable?

Again, Word has a selection of "well known" bugs that have never 
actually been fixed. For example

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/PageXofY.htm
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Numbering/WordsNumberingExplained.htm

Just two articles explaining ways to cope with Word brokenness. (And 
written by MVPs, no less.)

>> I'm also 98% sure none of the Word power users know about styles.
> 
> WTF?  You really need to send your "Word power users" on a beginners 
> course for Word.  And be concerned that they are happy to manually 
> change the font styles for every heading/caption/sub-heading and never 
> ever consider that there might be a faster way to do it.  What else are 
> they doing in their job so stupidly that they could be doing much more 
> effectively?

Spending many, many hours correcting formatting glitches *is* 
practically their entire job description.

[That's slightly unfair - they also made corrections, add new 
information, rearrange sections, etc. Since they use Word every single 
day, for hours on end, they know way more about Word than I do. For 
example, they apparently comprehend how Track Changes is actually 
supposed to work. But I've never seen them attempt to use styles...]

>> I'd be really surprised if anybody out there actually uses VB though.
> 
> Googling "VBA in Word" gives 5460000 results, seems like a lot of people 
> have something to say about it.

On second thoughts, allow me to clarify: I'd be really surprised if 
anybody who's job is to "use Word" actually sits down to *write* VB. 
There probably are a number of users who *use* VB that somebody else has 
written for them...

>> Because M$ tells us that "Word is easy". Why would you need training 
>> for something that is "easy"?
> 
> I think it says more about the mentality of the user if they don't seek 
> to find more efficient ways to work.  Not just in using software, but in 
> other things too.

Seems to me they're all just resigned to the fact that Word is horribly 
awkward to use? *shrugs*

But you have to admit, when M$ spends millions telling us how "easy" 
their software is to use and how it will "effortlessly transform the way 
you work", it does seem counterintuitive to think that you would need to 
expend effort to "learn" it. (Personally I'd suggest that M$ is vastly 
exaggerating just how "easy" their software is...)

> Even though we did two MS Office courses at work ages ago, I still quite 
> regularly think to myself "oh there *must* be a quicker way to do this, 
> surely someone else has needed to do this before" - and 99% of the time, 
> sure enough, there is functionality built-in to Word/Excel to do this. 
> That's what is the difference between Office 2008 and Word 2.0 / WordPad 
> / whatever.

I, personally, don't spent enough time using Word for this to crop up.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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