Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Word - everyone is an expert

Microsoft Word is Bill Gates' revenge on the nerds and anyone who won't RTFM.

I work in the tech industry and just about everyone who thinks they are a guru has major difficulty with Microsoft Word.

Why? Well they think that because they know some completely irrelevant application or programming language or deep technical *thing* that they are automatically qualified as an *expert* on all things software.

And so they start typing into Word and it accepts their input - and the next thing you know they have created an unholy mess and don't even know it.

What's worse is when they send it to 20 other people and that mess grows like topsy. It becomes a virus that 20 others have a go at to *add their value*.

The interesting thing about the tech business is that much of the day-to-day effort is spent on meetings, developing proposals, writing reports, managing projects and interacting with people. Like many industries, this requires mastering the Microsoft Office tools - at least until Google can build a credible alternative. Note to Eric - can you get the boys to move a bit faster!!!

But do you think anyone younger than 50 has a clue how to use Microsoft Word and it's complex formatting arrangements? Those who are older will know because they grew up with WordStar - which actually worked as advertised.

Technology was supposed to free us from complexity and make life easier - but all it has done (in the case of Microsoft Word) has made the resulting documents so incredibly convoluted that it is impossible to touch them without breaking something important.

All because the people who use it don't read the friggin manual and can't use simple things like *styles*. So we end up with layer upon layer of formatting crap all interacting with the inbuilt Microsoft *features* to create something that on the surface looks like a document. After a year of this and 20+ authors the document becomes unmanageable.

It's much worse when you are trying to run lots of concurrent projects with a team of tech nerds whose ego's all compete - showing off their mastery of the "iphone" and everything else irrelevant that is tech. To them it's a question of "What's the problem"?

So to the Microsoft Word product people - there is one additional key that I need in Word and it's the "Remove Rubbish" key. When pressed it will cycle through the document removing all the rubbish formatting and cleaning the document up. It will have to be as smart as Einstein to know which rubbish to remove - but hey that's Steve Ballmers' problem.

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