> Doing tasks manually instead of automatically. Computers excel at the simple, repetitive tasks which humans are terrible at. I remember seeing someone change a document which used the American English idiom of placing a comma after e.g. (i.e. “e.g., X”) to the less stilted British English idiom without the comma (i.e. “e.g. X”). The person editing did the change by scanning the (rather large) document and manually changing each occurrence, a task which took a couple of rather dispiriting hours. Inevitably, in a large document, some occurrences were missed. I fixed the remaining occurrences with 100% accuracy by using the ‘search and replace’ function in my text editor — which took less than 5 seconds.
This is true, but it's an example where the solution is obvious to many people and the answer -RTFM, or more politely "invest in training"- is simple. A different example would have been better. Consider removing a column of information from a text document. You can kludge this using a spreadsheet or you could do repeated search and replace (depending on the data) but this example asks us to think what people should do when their hammer stops being useful.
What should people do? How does someone doing routine office work learn how to use a database instead of a spreadsheet - and what spreadsheet should they use? More importantly, how do they learn what tools are appropriate?