Microsoft Word Irritants of the Day

I must admit that I have spent and probably continue to spend far too much time typing away in Word. In college, I didn't value papers on page length or word count alone. No, typing time was far too important to be ignored... and for different reasons depending on the situation.

Some examples:

"What, you wrote a 20 page paper in 12.2 hours? Including research and citations? No way!"

Conversely, "I spent 2 solid weeks of 4 hours a day working on this paper and received the same grade as 12.2 hour person over there. Life is so unfair."

Or, better yet, "I spent 8 hours just typing quotes to use in my paper... how about you? What, only two hours. No way are you going to make a good grade with that kind of laziness. Actually, who cares about grades... you will never be as pretentious as me so just shut up and go home."

I no longer have to worry about lengthy term papers that no one will ever care about thank God, but I write constantly. In ways, more than I did in college and my writing is now used to help companies make money. Not a bad gig. However, since my relationship with Word has continued into the professional realm, I have noticed some things that irritate me beyond belief.

For example, I was looking up synonyms for the word "estimate" the other day. What did the Word thesaurus spit out at me? Guesstimate. That's right, the word used exclusively by 3rd grade teachers and cheesy high school counselors. Maybe the occasional adult leadership conference speaker. Needless to say, I just stuck with estimate since my other options included "ballpark guess, good guess, close guest or estimate..." You get the idea.

Maybe I shouldn't have been so lazy that I needed to use a thesaurus that day, so I moved on from my guesstimate irritation.

Today, I was typing an email and was having a hard time thinking of a closing sentence. I decided to type "The End." Obviously, this was not a permanent fixture to the email, but it was mildly entertaining to me in the moment. Until Word yelled at me with its squiggly little green lines telling me that it was an improper sentence fragment. I understand that components of a proper sentence, believe me. However, I was pretty sure the last time I checked that "The End" is a completely appropriate use of grammar. Maybe not under the laws of formal English language, but certainly if "guesstimate" is included in the thesaurus then "The End" should be considered grammatically correct.

Maybe I'll write Bill Gates a letter of grievance while I'm into all my holiday complaining...

Advice of the Day

Learn Excel early on in your life. It's really not a hard program to use, but it's like learning a foreign language - if approached a young age it's incredibly easier to decipher and command.

Everyone should be required to have working knowledge of all basic Microsoft Office programs before graduating from college regardless of major. I distinctly remember only making one PowerPoint presentation and creating one Excel workbook in college. Meanwhile, I wrote nearly 200 papers. Those papers helped hone valuable skills that I use everyday. However, taking crash courses in PowerPoint and Excel on the job can lead to some interesting (often painful) results.

On a related note, props to Microsoft for planning to release free versions of its office suite with Windows 2007 (to be released in 2010.) The spokesperson did add a caveat about the online programs not functioning as well... as an explanation on how they plan to recover for any losses in the software revenue. They probably should have cleared that comment with Marketing, but they have nothing but time to develop and provide top quality products. As much as I trust Microsoft and its ability to innovate and adapt to meet the times (both in its business and technology), it always seems to drag its feet which is not beneficial to its image - especially to web-savvy clients who, for some reason, often favor Macs. Still, kudos for effort and for officially embracing Cloud Computing.