I saw a post on LinkedIn yesterday that really surprised me. A US based author who, according to his profile, has published 1000s of articles, ghost written numerous books and basically been in the writing biz for over 14 years has a problem with Microsoft Word.
It seems that the program “refuses to cooperate” due to “invisible junk under the text”.
He then goes on to describe this hidden junk, which in fact are paragraph markers, tabs, line breaks, section breaks and so on. In other words, standard and valid parts of many if not most documents.
Following his comments, quite a number of people agreed with the original poster and gave the various ways they have used to get around the issue, from moving text from Word into a text editor, to switching to Word Perfect or my favourite, writing in HTML!
Good grief.
I was utterly gobsmacked I admit. I really would have thought that a person with this much experience in writing using Word would be aware of the Show / Hide button in the toolbar / ribbon labelled “¶”.
When clicked on, this shows ALL of the codes Word is using allowing you to find any glitches due to (usually) fat fingers.
My own initial observation made by making a comment on the original was “Doesn’t anyone read the software’s documentation anymore?”
Documentation
Over many years I have pushed the same basic line that if you read the documentation for your software (or hardware, smartwatch, car, phone, TV, drone, camera etc etc) you’ll learn heaps of stuff that makes that software (or whatever) even more useful and valuable.
I do appreciate there is a problem that the day of a good hard bound written manual is long gone, more’s the pity. My benchmark was always the original Word for Windows Manual closely followed by Blackmagic’s Da Vinci Resolve and Maxon’s Cinema 4D. Other vendors and software publishers should look at these and take note.
Currently users must initially rely on small pieces of paper with equally small writing for installation instructions and then online PDFs for detailed information on command structures and even tutorials.
In some cases, there is not even a PDF, but a series of web pages based on the reasoninng, according to the vendor(s), that specifications and program features change on a regular basis and this is the easiest way to keep information up to date.
At least a PDF manual can be printed off and bound, either at home or by a commercial service such as Officeworks for just a few dollars. An online PDF only – or worse, these accursed web pages – are useless if you cannot get online for whatever reason.
Social Media Ban
But then I saw a second post, that while not on the same subject, sort of covered the same general area, this time revolving around the social media ban for teens.
My own opinion on this is that is simply the Government is being “seen” to do something, whilst privately knowing there is actually bugger all they can do in the overall scheme of things. Just as a 16 year old wants booze or to see an R rated video, they will get it one way or another, so they’ll get around the social media ban if they really want to.
And it doesn’t need too much computer savvy-ness to do that as some of my peers have already shown in stories about their own ankle-biters.
It has been suggested that parents should get involved, and I strongly agree with that absolutely and it was also mentioned that there are tools available to block access to sites and apps etc. And yes, there is. But these all work on the assumption that the average Mum and Dad knows how to use these things, and I suspect they do not. I have spent enough years in radio talkback computer shows, in online forums, face-to-face and via emails and telephone calls answering computer and software related questions to know that perhaps the average public is not as computer savvy as many IN the industry think they are.
The questions that are asked are usually very basic stuff too – my printer won’t work, my email won’t send, videos stutter on playback, how do i see my photos from my phone on my computer, I’ve forgotten my password and so on.
During my years as the “tech expert” on 2GB with Brian Wilshire, you could guarantee EVERY week someone would ring in and say their disk defrag would never end! (Hint: turn off every running program including your screen saver).
But they say, people are savvier now than they were say, 10 years ago. Aren’t they?
A few years back, I had a long conversation on this subject with a computer science teacher at a major Sydney High School.
His verdict? Parents think their kids are little computer geniuses. Some are, but they are a very small minority. Most of the others know how to play a game (usually after pirating it), find online porn and use Instagram and TikTok, but give them real world examples like Excel or Word and they are hopeless.
So, I wonder, as tech journos, are we exacerbating the problem by the way we do reviews? Are average people starting to read and then your eyes glaze over when you see some of the technical jargon we give you, whether it be the specs of the processor inside a dSLR, the read/write speed of an SSD drive (or even its capacity), or the power to weight ratio of the latest electric car (and don’t get me started on tech reviewing bloody toothbrushes and vacuum cleaners).
Are we telling you what it IS, but you want to know what it DOES and how that helps? Is it as simple as that?
Let me know your thoughts on these subjects in the comments below, or privately via email.