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Comment by refactor_master | Hacker News Reader

That rant, wow. It really resonates deeply with me. People would rather cumulatively spend some 10000 hours yelling at Office for the rest of their lives, instead of spending 10 over the course of some evenings/weekends to brush up on the basics. Even from an immediate-more-important-priorities-perspective it almost doesn’t make sense to me.

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I think computer geeks tend not to recall how many hard-won insights and how much time it took for them to reach the point where learning "the basics" of MS Office would only take ten hours of study & practice. We think it's easy because we're building on decent-to-good mental models of how computers & software & networks operate.

Normal people don't have those, and every second of the thousands of hours it'd take to gain them would be miserable for them. Not everyone enjoys this crap. Most aren't born with the kind of good abstract and/or spatial reasoning abilities that makes this stuff relatively easy to figure out, either.

Will brushing up help when Microsoft moves all the menus in the next edition? How about when they add in new errors and make File Explorer not return correct results and Windows Search just searches Bing instead of your computer? Or when they add stuff like “you aren’t allowed to attach that file to an email. It’s because it’s open in Word, but we’re not telling you that. Yes, we know this only happens in Outlook and not Gmail.” Its Office’s fault that everyone hates it.

Microsoft moves the menus in office at most once a decade. They just kept adding onto the Office 95 menus for twelve years, then they introduced ribbons, now 13 years later they move away from ribbons.

They aren't some SaaS company that moves things for fun

All of which largely became unimportant when they introduced the "Tell me what you want to do" search box to Office programs. Blessed be its name.

Anecdote: As a young intern at a German bank I was sent to talk to an older colleague (probably in his 50s, no idea for how long he already works for the bank). I needed him to look up some account number or ID in a data export he had.

1. He opened the data export in Excel.

2. I told him the number for which I needed some additional information.

3. He started scrooling in this 1k + entries Excel file.

4. …

5. I ask: Can you press CTRL + F and type in the number?

6. …

Related to this: just how easy is powerful software meant to be?

People who don't know how to drive don't blame it on cars.

It's fractal, I see this even in the tech industry itself - people are reluctant to sit down with a manual for an hour to figure out how some software (or device) works, and prefer to forever call it "too complicated to use", just because they couldn't grok it in 30 seconds.

The flip side of this is that interfaces are changing constantly. As soon as I've committed something to muscle memory, a forced app update will overhaul a UI and I need to relearn where to find basic commands. When compounded by the hundreds of programs I use across multiple OS's and platforms, I get used to just assuming that interfaces are and features constantly in flux. This means that I invest less in deeply learning any specific tool.

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