[pedrokost]

I have been observing something similar recently, but related to other technologies. People claiming they are good at Excel, but can't do a vlookup or a pivot table. People using 5% of the power of an IDE. People not realizing that if they are able to use a web-based tool at work, they could (probably) also access it remotely.

And these are just the things I have noticed in the past week.

We utilize just a tiny percentage of options that are available to us, barely enough to get the basics of out tasks done. But we are completely oblivious that there are probably better/hidden/power tools available in the software we are already using that could help us achieve our tasks much more efficiently.

Interestingly, most people probably don't care about it, or are so oblivious of their lack of knowledge that they don't even search for better ways to do things.

It's hard to blame thought. Improving this state requires a mentality of continuous active learning, where you don't just wait for someone to show you how to do your task better, but to constantly expand your knowledge into areas you don't even think you need to improve. However, most of us usually have "better things to do" than reading software manuals.

[Smoosh]

I think part of this was that in the past, computers and software were new and novel. People had no comparative experience, so training had to be provided to fully explain what you could do & how you could do it.

Compare to today where most people "learn" by immersion - you have to use Google Docs or Excel for your school work, so you adsorb just enough to get your work done without really understanding the fundamentals or the more complex or non-obvious features, since you weren't taught systematically or comprehensively.

Then you "know" Excel, or Word well enough to get by - but don't know that you are barely scratching the surface of it's capabilities, or don't realize that being more competent with the tool will make you more capable and productive. And thus the motivation/opportunity isn't there to invest that time and effort.

[hhas01]

The obvious observation about Excel: spreadsheets are a highly specialized expert tool for highly specialized expert users (accountants).

Most Excel users aren’t; and most don’t even use it for its designed purpose, i.e. user-programmable parallel calculations, but rather for ad-hoc ersatz databases.

Of course, said users are rarely any better at designing and using databases than they are at bookkeeping.