I was teaching people Word, Excel & PowerPoint at my last job, about 15
people, 1 hour per week.  I taught them a lot, fast.  After the quick demo
of what you can do with styles, one guys jaw dropped, and he stated that
he'd wasted half his life fiddling with formatting.

I actually quite impressed with PowerPoint, although I hate being on the
receiving end.  I only ever met one other person who knew it.  Learn Styles,
Master slide, Outline view, Layout, Guides, Templates and you're done.

After I taught them Word, I could teach PowerPoint in 30 minutes.

My 5% formatting time is based on new documents.  For lawyer & accountants,
the time is nearly 0%.  They know what format they want, thank you very
much!

PicList must be elite, my usual estimate is 1/1000 know Word.  Here we have
3/2000!

My "No-Bullshit Guide to Office" is progressing...

Tony



> -----Original Message-----
> From: piclist-bounces@mit.edu [mailto:piclist-bounces@mit.edu]On Behalf
> Of Gerhard Fiedler
> Sent: Thursday, 7 April 2005 9:11 PM
> To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public.
> Subject: Re: [OT][AD] MS Word, was Ideas for books on PIC
>
>
> Tony Smith wrote:
>
> >>> So what do all you authors use for (non-fiction writing) software?  I
> >>> was contemplating doing some writing, and found microsoft word (which
> >>> I assumed did everything) to be terribly lacking in things like
> >>> including source code examples and such.  Short of $$$ packages like
> >>> Framemaker, ...
>
> >> I've also used Word for writing reports, which included figures and
> >> images.  In my opinion, it is lousy for desktop publishing.
>
> > Styles aren't a good thing, they are THE thing.  If you don't
> know styles,
> > you don't know Word.
>
> I'm often amazed at how people who didn't figure out Word want to
> try their
> luck with the publishing applications like Framemaker, Quark etc.  If you
> don't want to spend the time to figure out how to make Word behave and do
> what you want, you probably won't have much luck with these more complex
> packages either. Of course they can do things that Word can't, but most of
> the complaints are not about things that Word can't do, they are about
> things that the person hasn't taken the time to learn how to do. I figure
> that the time to learn how to do them with Quark is not less.
>
> I don't do a lot of advertising or newsletter type publishing
> where complex
> page layouts, text flowing through several arbitrarily placed frames or
> professional color handling is important. But I write a lot of non-fiction
> professional documents, and I have yet to find a formatting challenge that
> couldn't be rather easily resolved with Word. If you want to make
> your life
> easy, think a bit about how you want it to look, create the styles, and
> work with them.
>
> Sometimes I rework a document created by someone else without
> using styles.
> It's amazing how the visual consistency increases with a bit of
> thought and
> structuring work. If you want people to read your stuff,
> /thinking/ about a
> suitable presentation and actually designing it is not something that
> should be neglected. (Yes, that's design work. You may be able to add a
> whole new dimension to your documentation by looking at it that way.)
>
> (That's of course not restricted to Microsoft Word. That's the same thing
> with any presentation system.)
>
>
> > Formatting a document should take less than 5% of your time.
> Much less if
> > you're in law or accounting.
>
> Especially if you find yourself writing similarly formed documents
> repeatedly. You can't know how styles makes this easier and the result
> better until you've tried it.
>
> Gerhard
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