I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word | Hacker News Reader

I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

newyorker.com

134 pointsopdahl155 comments

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..."

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.

Reading your comment I remembered the guy who implemented 3D doom in Excel

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/3d-engine-entirely-made...

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.

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.

> 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.

I 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.

You say this. But 99% of lawyers do not know how to do these things.

What is it about doctors, lawyers, and really really basic computer proficiency?

Their 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).

> 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

This 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.

My 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.

There 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"?

> 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.

Yeah, well, ironically enough, working like this makes you a very proficient Word user.

Exactly. 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.

> 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.)

If 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).

Yes, IntelliJ is easy to fix, just the default is broken.

Word, not so much.

I constantly run into this issue when I'm not using Emacs (or Emacs compliant keybindings), it's excessively annoying.

Emacs, 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 :-)

I 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.

Now I'm curious about what software is used in actual ink-on-dead-trees book publishing.

I 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?

I 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_o...

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/7p9s8q/shou...

[2] https://www.creativebloq.com/buying-guides/best-desktop-publ...

Quark XPress used to be the best publishing software; then their CEO made a number of very bad decisions and they almost disappeared from the scene. The standard is now InDesign. It's very good but very expensive. Affinity Publisher is ok, lacks some advanced features, but is so cheap compared to InDesign it may as well be free. MS Publisher, I'm not sure. Never really heard about it in good or bad.

QuarkXpress was not able to preview images on the page for an embarrassingly long time. You would draw a box and import an image to it and it would just keep a box with an x in it to indicate that a picture will be there. You had to render a print preview to see the images.

I have worked in ink-on-dead-trees book publishing for over 20 years.

The vast majority of print-interior typesetting is being done with Adobe InDesign.

Some publishers (still) have their own system that does not use Word styles - usually using ASCII tags inserted into the content. These are often legacy approaches dating from the 1980s, but if it works why change it?

A few have begun to use Markdown-based systems, but this is very rare in commercial publishing.

The vast majority of author-to-editor-preproduction workflows are done in Microsoft Word. Some publishers (including the one I worked for, and the ones I work with now) use Word styles for all content formatting. Part of the editorial "pre-production" task is to take what authors give us (font formatting with bold / italic, paragraph formatting with returns and tabs) and convert it to styles.

Sounds similar to my college professors tut-tutting writing behaviours like run-on sentences when every journal article and book in our syllabus had writers doing exactly that.

Everyone has a workflow and wants the input data cleansed how they like. Science journals are just the worst. So much time and money wasted by researchers just doing things like adding a hundred words to this paragraph for this submission, limiting the references to 30 for that one, putting the images all on one document for this journal, putting them in separate files for that one, making the figures independent, making all subfigures together on one page, using this dpi, using that margin with, page numbers yes, page numbers no. Editors should just ask for submissions to be in plain text, images just uploaded in whatever quality you have them, and then they could have a simple bash script do all their inane formatting and automatically fit sub figures evenly to a page. They'd probably complain this maybe 25 line script I'm imagining would put them out of work, though, so I'm not holding my breath.

> 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.

> 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.

Type 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.

How 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.

It's faster because you don't have to stop to select the text, you just type continuously.

ctrl-i is stateful... typing ^isome text^i will get it in italics.

Yeah ok, that'd be better than selecting after the fact, but it's not "the same number of keystrokes". It breaks the flow a little, whereas using _ doesn't.

But if you don't like it, don't use it.

Not to belabor this point but it is indeed the same number of key strokes. CTRL i requires two keys and and underscore required two keys as well.

Ah yes, that's the reason for the argument then. On a French (AZERTY) keyboard underscore is its own key, no shift or ctrl.

(There are ways to configure the keyboard to change the arrangement of keys to best suit your needs. I used to do this, but the big drawback is that if you change machines all your habits are wrong and you waste a lot of time finding the keys again.)

To 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.

Basically, you have an MBA.

Good 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

I 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.

Probably 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.

Two 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.

It'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.

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.

There sure is: 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-fina...

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.

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.

Roughly,

Step 1: Insert pivot table Step 2: Set data source Step 3: set row (pivots) Step 4: set value (summary)

“Must know ten flavors of Markdown”

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.

That goes to show that the difficulty is not on the software's UI.

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.

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

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

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

that's kinda fascinating, what's an example

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Inside humor is a kernel of truth, and in the subtle washed-out humor of this article I think the kernel of truth is that people WANT tools that they can use from childhood to old age. Tools that will remain constant. Tools that can serve a variety of purposes. Tools that will be familiar even as the world changes.

This is a challenge for software development. We are reaching the point now where there are tools like Microsoft Word which have been available with recognizable continuity for 30+ years. But even it isn't clear the right business model for software which is intended for a decades-lasting long term stable release. Is it the Office 365 subscription? Copyleft open source?

> I think the kernel of truth is that people WANT tools that they can use from childhood to old age. Tools that will remain constant. Tools that can serve a variety of purposes. Tools that will be familiar even as the world changes.

People say they want tools like that... then whinge when said tools don't keep in lockstep with current-year UI fads.

The example I think of is Emacs. It works more or less the way it did when I became an Emacs user over 25 years ago, with vastly improved functionality, and it's worked that way since long before I started using it. And yet Hackernews, Reddit, and the Emacs mailing lists themselves are awash with people whose only contribution is to declare that Emacs will die unless it is completely overhauled and to look and behave exactly like the poster's favorite current-year IDE. Which was Eclipse 20 years ago, Sublime Text or JetBrains 10 years ago, and VSCode today.

Those other tools come and go, but Emacs is forever. Well, that is, until a successful campaign is launched to convince the world that its current UI is racist, misogynist, ableist, or otherwise harms some marginalized group, and the Emacs maintainership is disbanded and replaced with leaders more respectful of modern ESG guidelines.

Emacs is criticised for its very steep learning curve, not just for being different.

(Shallow learning curve. A steep learning curve means you acquire proficiency quickly—imagine a graph of proficiency over time.)

Interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve

The common expression "a steep learning curve" is a misnomer suggesting that an activity is difficult to learn and that expending much effort does not increase proficiency by much, although a learning curve with a steep start actually represents rapid progress.

I originally said "high learning curve", but I started wondering what it meant for a curve to be "high". I then looked up the "correct" expression -- and copied it because it was a common usage -- but found it confusing for the reason you said. The confusion might come from climbing a steep hill: It's tiring.

Why can't I put time on the Y axis?

You can—but that would be unusual.

I would personally replace "Tools" with "Cognitive models".

A hammer and a nail gun really don't differ all that much when your task is binding wood.

As someone in the trades, I really disagree. Most applications that require a hammer could not be accomplished with a nail gun. Nail guns are great for attaching thin materials over thicker materials, like putting MDX onto a frame or attaching roofing materials. You don't generally frame with a nail gun because you want to use larger and heavier nails driven a lot deeper. For very light or precision work on finished surfaces you go back to the hammer because it reduces the chance of scuffing or marking on the surface.

"Binding wood" is much more nuanced than you make it seem.

Oh man, if you haven't seen "Reality Contains a Surprising Amount of Detail", prepare to be delighted.

Also: I thought there were framing nailers that fire larger coated sinkers like you'd drive with a hammer? When are those appropriate, and when should nailing framing be done by hand?

No one hammers framing nails by hand anymore, except occasionally. The framing nailer has completely taken over. There are even very good cordless framing nailers now, so no dragging an air hose behind you everywhere you go.

It's been a few years since I did any framing, so I could be wrong about the current state of the industry.

I worked as a framer with my dad for around 4 years in the mid 2000s. We framed small residential homes in southern Colorado and although we would always carry a hammer on our belt to "align" a stud, bend flashing and drive in nails that hit a knot; nail guns hooked up to a shared compressor was how nearly everything got, well, nailed together.

What the analogy proposes as that the cog models and tools sort of develop in tandem.

It's a logical step from a hammer to another driver because you have experience with the fundamental tools.

I would say that cognitive models develop more rapidly and we design tools to fill that space, occasionally developing a tool that can expand the space, usually by building on knowns.

Sorry to diminish your trade in particular :) It was the first thing that came to mind.

I hope that makes sense in context.

What analogy are you going for? Screwdrivers? Hammers? Even those haven't stayed the same. While I still have the old reliable Craftsman flat blade, I also have a very nice Wera bit driver and a box full of Torx screws. Drills have gone from corded-only to brushless lithium.

You could tell me that I could stick to old tools but then I'm going to throw your drill chuck key into the lawn.

I cannot tell you how unproductive I am in Microsoft Word. I use LaTeX, often in overleaf, often natively in linux, often on MacOS. Naturally, the latter has a Word version available in it and as a scientist at the interface of physics and biology/medicine I (un)fortunately have plenty of experience in both. Some of my colleagues carte-blanch refuse to try TeX (interestingly, I've never had a doctor refuse to write in Overleaf with me -- only biochemists).

Writing a paper in Word is like pulling nasal hair out through the back of my throat.

It's eminently possible to do it. Millions of people around the world do. Yet it is death by a thousand tiny, frustrating cuts. From the fact that the keyboard shortcuts are not those of the rest of the operating system (on MacOS or Linux on the online app -- e.g. ctrl+shift+arrow keys to highlight text works differently in Word to every other OS) to the fact that opening the paper, writing something, closing it, and re-opening it doesn't necessarily get you the same bloody document. I was editing something last night (from a biologist -- who had done MRI on Burmese pythons – alas the reconstruction was done in matlab and not python!) and each time I saved, my "tracked changes" went from displaying my name to "Author". I forget the number of times I've seen "Unknown field code changed" on the right hand side. If you want to work with references from many people, forget about it. LaTeX has literally none of these problems. Sure, it has a lot of other problems, but none of these ones. I just can't stand using Word; it is inconsistent, slow, and incorrectly second-guesses you. I'm not saying that everyone and their grandparents should use LaTeX, but the disparity -- and the comparative rareness of alternatives, outside of inDesign and Quark in the professional publishing scene -- does deeply worry me. Office is one of those areas where the Microsoft strangehold is strongest. And it's objectively a bad experience!

Seeing "Proficient with Microsoft Office" on a CV for me is a bit of a red flag; highlighting another job skill is probably a better use of space, at the very least.

>mucho texto

OK, but what if your applicant had this in his CV? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlX_pThh7z8

> Seeing "Proficient with Microsoft Office" on a CV for me is a bit of a red flag; highlighting another job skill is probably a better use of space, at the very least.

Well, it shouldn't. The candidate does not know what kind of checkbox exercise their CV ends up on, so they should not be penalized for trying to cover weird edge-cases.

True story: I once applied for a 'ranked' job which needed me to "prove" IT skills. By that point I had a masters in advanced computer science (with specialization in machine learning). The scoring for the job went as follows:

- Demonstrates IT skills proficiency via European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL): 2 points

- Demonstrates IT skills proficiency via other means: 1 point.

- No IT skills demonstrated: 0 points.

I scored 1 point. Given the competitive nature of this process, apparently that single point cost me about 1000 places down in the rankings, so I got none of the positions that interested me the most.

According to the infinite wisdom of the recruitment checklist, being able to program your own word suite was pittance compared to being able to type in one.

I literally had to drag my ass to the nearest public library, subscribe to, and actually ATTEND (due to mandatory attendance) an ECDL course for the next 6 months, just so I could score more highly in the next round of job applications.

The fundamental problem is that all of Office was designed for a different time, and irredeemably sucks at two things:

* True version control and useful change tracking of content

* Intercompatability of formats with other tools

If we could get away from v2,v3,v4 suffixes on files, and your data basically going into those Roach Motels of file formats, maybe it could become worthwhile someday.

For now, it's just a vomitous throwback to the bad old 90's software design mechanics.

There is a lot of truth in this. The common argument for word is "track changes is good", but it actually sucks in many ways: try doing a three-way merge, for example (from co-authors A, B and C) or a diff. TeX can use all of the power of modern editors and this sort of thing just happens really nicely; with git it happens seamlessly.

I think another big problem is that Word is one monolithic thing that aims to do everything, and in reality does nothing well.

I do not have in-depth experience using Microsoft Word or LaTeX for writing papers. Nevertheless I found this funny:

> LaTeX has literally none of these problems. Sure, it has a lot of other problems, but none of these ones

> Office is one of those areas where the Microsoft strangehold is strongest. And it's objectively a bad experience!

The rest of your comment does not logically conclude to "it's objectively a bad experience", although that might seem obvious to someone who has used both in-depth.

Counterpoint: Working in anything not a WYSISYG editor (or close, like markdown) is painful for me. Changing styles and formatting is direct - there is no code that you need to worry about, and no "27 errors" because you (or the others in your team) messed up a few semicolons somewhere. Mind you, I'm not saying that latex is bad (especially for citations). But if I'm driving a car at highway speeds I'd rather have the car have handle autobraking and power steering and ABS rather than not.

This might be the first time that I've seen someone who's used both WYSISYG and TeX pick the former. If you don't mind, how proficient are you in TeX?

As someone mentioned in another thread, the formatting in Word and other such software is terribly inconsistent. No guarantee that the document will look the same in two machines, let alone across platforms. The formatting is "direct" for a while but change a single period or colon anywhere in the document and that messes everything up.

Not sure I understand the driving analogy. Care to explain?

I'm admittedly not very good at TeX - I can make a document and work, but will likely hit a few errors. It's not that I can't use it properly - I consider myself decently tech-savvy (this is hackernews after all) and I am used to coding (C++/python, even a bit of html and css), and I frequently Google whenever I get stuck. However I find most tasks in tex (I mainly use overleaf) much longer than the corresponding task in word. I don't think I have ever gotten "stuck" in word the way you can in overleaf (eg numbered lists). I don't have to worry about an entire file system with different files for different chapter and images in word, for example - the software handles that itself - you add a '1.' and word starts a numbered list. Fewer buttons to press.

Mind you, it's not that I don't understand the reasoning behind TeX - yes, it is quite logical - but to use another terrible analogy (sorry!) it's like comparing assembly code for a particular computer with python - one is way more specific and doesn't have half a dozen dependencies, but the other is much more "human" in its use and readability.

I fully agree that word compatibility is terrible and I hate MS's monopolistic practices as much (I use OpenOffice too and prefer odt files). But within our university everyone has the latest version of word and things work reasonably decently.

(The driving analogy was that Office assumes and does things for you automatically, just like a car activating the ABS system, while with TeX you manually need to do it. More control, but also more effort.)

(Also, Google docs >>> Word imo. Amongst other reasons, because word doesn't support fonts like Inter properly.)

Thank you! I submitted a paper to a conference this week but my advisor does not use LaTeX. You can imagine the suffering I had to go through during the draft process.

It's such a PAIN! to have to work on Word for any kind of scientific writing. The formatting issues make me want to cry. I'm also on Linux so no desktop Word client and using Word or google docs on the web is extremely slow and frustrating. LibreOffice Writer comes with some compatibility issues.

Anyone who is doing technical work and needs to have stuff in writing often definitely needs to learn Markdown at the very least, imo. You are needlessly limiting yourself and causing a lot of pain to collaborators by sticking to Word.

Word has the same built in scripting language as other Office applications, and you can use its object model if you like, as well as access anything else that a Windows system can do.

I don't know what the explanation is for people not liking Word, but it can't be "because I like writing code to produce documents and LaTeX is the only option for that".

I agree that LaTeX is much more pleasant to work with, and I’d rather use it than Word.

However I still have “Proficient with Microsoft Office" on my CV (along with LaTeX) because companies expect it, and I’ll be forced to use it. I often write reports in Word, not because I prefer it over LaTeX, but because it’s mandated by the company.

A contractor billed us for some work. He opened the laptop, filled in item prices and item counts as we requested. All of this in a very nice excel template.

Then he took his cellphone calculator app, multiplied counts with prices, filling in the subtotals in the excel sheet. Another round of the calculator summed these to a grand total, and a final round calculated taxes. Both were dutifully typed in at the bottom of the excel sheet.

I died a little that day.

Futurama nails it once again?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jMG1D8XeLDA

don't ever step in any office you will evaporate

every job I had was filled with endless streams of redundancy of this kind

I even consider the public sector a state wide incarnation of this principle

Don’t overthink it people

Take thirty seconds to read it. Smirk. Or don't. Then move on.

This article is funny, but I actually did sit down one weekend and read a book on Word (I think it was Word 2007). I was actually shocked at how complex and sophisticated a word-processing tool could get. Even back then there were a lot of surprisingly useful features like footnote processing and multi-document support that I never even would have thought of looking for.

This is a disappointing version of something much funnier that would be found in McSweeney's.

Requirements: 5+ years italicizing text. 3+ years using Arial and Helvetica.

“I’ve used Tahoma for 7 years.”

“Sorry, that’s not really what we’re looking for. Now, please draw a capital ‘A’ in Times Roman on the whiteboard.”

“…” (applicant realizes they should’ve spent more time on LeetWord.com)

The amount of calls that come to the helpdesks around the world, that are caused by people not knowing anything about Word/Excel is astounding.

In the old days of office applications you needed to know all the keystrokes and macros and control codes. Remember the keyboard overlays you could buy for each word processor/spreadsheet? You basically had to be an expert to be proficient.

Then they went and dumbed it down, adding menus, buttons, giving everyone mice, the power of WYSIWYG. Now every idiot in the office could print out a mispelled sign about keeping the counters clean in 48 point comic sans, print it in landscape and tape it to the microwave.

Microsoft continues to screw stuff up by adding things like 'Reading Mode'. I've seen office staff brought to tears when a document is automatically opened in reading mode by a middle manager who thinks that matches the print layout, and lays into them about how it looks.

These days you unknowingly launch a document in Word for the web and it's in read-only mode because of Sharepoint permissions that aren't clear, so you can't toggle the checkboxes and it takes 3 co-workers to figure out what went wrong.

> The amount of calls that come to the helpdesks around the world, that are caused by people not knowing anything about Word/Excel is astounding.

Haha, never go work in a public library or at a school/college, especially in a poor area. The amount of times I had to tell some poor student near tears that their professor/school/work/whoever had effed up was too high.

https://archive.is/BABPG

> Excel’s boundless rectangles yield themselves to my whim as I sort columns and freeze rows like a rational demigod.

I wonder if the author is a "top sheethead," (part of the pro excel scene)? The article doesn't offer an opinion on the controversial Chinese localization fix of 2019[1] for example.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY

I recommend the "How to REALLY use Microsoft Office" video tutorial series from Scott Hanselman: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0M0zPgJ3HSeTcj_bH9ul...

Might be a little bit off topic, but it blows my mind how functionally the office suite is unchanged for the past 30 years especially including how slow it runs. It's like there is this baked in knowledge that these apps have always been pretty slow and crappy in that regard, and since there is apparently no expectation from the paying customers that it won't ever be slow nor is there any competition (my workplace along with plenty of other enterprise customers will never not pay for both gsuite and ms office just because that's what they always blow money on), there's no pressure to make things performant. I wish I could degrade my workplace office 365 license into a windows XP era version of office. That would absolutely fly on modern hardware.

Well, I'll just come out and say it. I love Word. Always have. I love Windows too. There.

I never understood The New Yorker. This is in humor, is this supposed to be funny?

If it's humor, then I am definitely a target of ridicule, cause I read the stuff thinking: ha! He doesn't even know about Styles, Outlines and Sections.

Yeah The New Yorker always seems pretentious in away how the guy in the bar scene in Good Will Hunting is. Typically cater towards Ivy league educated trust fund crowd.

Well, I’m as far removed from a Ivy League education as one can be and I found this quite funny. But I’m also someone who uses Word since early 00s and can relate a lot to this text.

The running joke about the New Yorker is that you can replace any of their comic captions with "Christ, what an asshole" and they still work.

Honestly, "Christ, what an asshole" is funnier than anything they caption their comics with, so it's a helpful thing to know.

A "Proficient in HTML" title might be more funny to the HN crowd.

New Yorker "humor" columns always seem to be more "humorous" than actually funny. You're lucky if you get a smirk from reading one of them.

A classic sendup of the New Yorker from Seinfeld:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1fSMUOzufI

I realize the article was supposed to be humorous (it's in the humor section), but the amusing thing is that I'm seeing declining use of Word. Communication has gotten a lot more formal. People are happy to edit a report in the e-mail editor, using a screen capture utility to copy and paste bitmap graphics when needed. Or they use the editor in the cloud version and don't bother to learn where all of its features are. Or PowerPoint. Of course the programmers have switched to Markdown or comment-free code.

The main remaining uses for Word seem to be documents that nobody reads.

The amusing thing I am seeing is how much the decline of a tool aimed squarely at paper-based communication can still surprise me given the extent to which paper based communication has basically ceased to exist. The part of me that didn't expect the decline and the part that didn't expect Word to stick around so long don't even shout at each other, it's as if there wasn't any contradiction at all.

An amusing anecdote is that when my kids were in school, they were supposed to word process their written assignments according to formatting standards that included things like margins, for documents that would never be printed. And the standards came from a group that was ironically named "Modern Language Association."

Today kids just do everything in the cloud and don't think twice about it.

The publishing industry runs on Word, according to my writer acquaintances. You may write your book in something better designed for big complex text projects such as Scrivener, but it’s gotta turn into Word when it goes to them, and stays Word through all the editing process.

What about LaTeX?

If you think about how LaTeX has little to no use outside of certain sciences and maths in largely academic settings, then it's pretty obvious to understand that most people in publishing have very little interest in learning something entirely new when Word, which they've probably used for decades now, gets the job done just fine until they slap all of it into InDesign for the final typesetting anyway.

Besides, typed manuscripts often have little to no formatting anyway. They are essentially using Word as a "plain" text editor with red-lining built in.

> has little to no use outside of certain sciences and maths in largely academic settings

This is just incorrect. TeX is typesetting software so it's extremely versatile and allows you to do a wide range of things that are not possible with WYSIWYG editors and Markdown.

Consider: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/940/what-professions...

… Anyone else remember Microsoft Works? I remember liking it a lot more because it was a little faster.

The article talked about using Microsoft Word in Windows 95, and all I could think of was Microsoft Works.

Loved the humor in this article, In a way I feel like that's how me and markdown are right now. I probably spend 25% of my computer time jotting down stuff in markdown documents.

I’m not sure I’m proficient at Word. I’ve used word processors for decades, but I stopped using them on a regular basis after college (mid to late 90s). Back then I used Word Perfect. Since then I’ve only needed to use one a few times a year. And never anything more complicated than something like a super simple sign with large letters. I find Word to be complicated when I try to use it. Why are the menus constantly changing? How does anyone find anything when they change so often?

Coming from the half-broken, arcane user interfaces of the programming world, GUI interfaces like the one Word has are a piece of cake. Even if you haven't used these programs for years -- and have largely missed their repeated UI overhauls -- the interfaces are so discoverable that you can learn the latest iteration of these programs without reading a book or looking anything up.

I sometimes suspect that there's a large subset of programmers who are irrationally snobby and elitist towards discoverable UX.

Oh my God, now tell us how you navigate the bugs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220121101822/https://www.newyo...

I can wield and control tens of thousands of systems and bend them to do my bidding. But my inability in Office Products is my biggest source of impostor syndrome stress.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to keep snapping to the beginning and end of a really long column in Excel, trying to see what’s in the middle.

Yeah, thats cool i know very well about MS Office and sth, i think we are all in the same stage of link with Nowadays Microsoft is part of our life. And it's growing and like we also.

I formatted an entire book in Word once. Even though this was early in my career and something I may have wanted on my CV, I never spoke of it again. Never again.

Two satires from The New Yorker on HN front page in one day!

This should have been about Excel. I see way more puffery surrounding Excel than I do Word.

I think newyorker.com is the most beautiful news site out there. The typography is just awesome, nice to read on mobile aswell!

This an attempt at humor, and very inept at that.

I would, however, welcome an article that explained the difference between being proficient or event competent at Word and claiming you are.

I spent a lot of time as a high schooler and as a student working with Word. Even today, 20 years later and with Google Docs I routinely use "arcane knowledge" like setting tab stops in the ruler which looks like magic to many friends who never had to work with Word.

Alt-T-L, mofos.

If I never had to touch Microsoft Word ever again in my career, that will be nice.

Oooooooh I get it.

It’s a joke about how writers should advertise writer skills rather than word skills.

Maybe…

I like it! Even the title made me chuckle...

Is this supposed to be funny?

This is nerd-shaming, and just as bad as other types of shaming.

No self respecting 'nerd' would be using Word.

Isn't this comment nerd-shaming? I use LibreOffice Writer (and sometimes Word) quite frequently, and I consider myself somewhat of a nerd.

Is nerd-gatekeeping the same thing as nerd-shaming?

I don’t see it as nerd shaming. It seems to be more poking fun at the skills people list on their résumés.

I agree with you that it's probably not nerd shaming. Having said that, I read it as poking fun at the skills people are expected/forced to list on their CVs.

"M.Sc. in Software Engineering. 15 years of software development experience. Successful founder of two startups. Other skills: E-mail, Word, Excel, Powerpoint".

In any case, and seeing how varied the comments here are, I officially label it "art".

I am surprised by the number of people completely missing the piece's tone!

I wonder if the folks seeing nerd shaming are being thrown off by the Napoleon-Dynamite-esque photo.

Which makes sense, because VERY few people actually knows how to use Word with any significant level of proficiency. I'm guessing more people have advanced Excel skills.

Word is pretty forgiving, for smaller texts, where you could easily go around and fixing heading manually for instance. That leads people to believe that they have "Word skills". I've seen maybe a handful of people being able to seriously utilize Words huge feature set to make their job easier.

It seems to be more at people with real skills being drilled about their Word skills in an interview.

"Well it's nice that you have a few university degrees and 19 yeras of experience in journalism; how proficient are you in MS Word?"

"Oh, I can't even begin to tell you how! You better sit back and relax as this story takes us all the way back to Windows 95 ..."

Word is a solution looking for a problem. It exists because of MS wormed itself into public systems around the globe, and it became the standard for writing and publishing. It does both of those tasks horribly compared to any alternatives (markdown, latex).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com