[mrweasel]

Companies frequently moan about "re-training", but in my experience users of e.g. Word, or Excel don't need re-training, they need training. A large number of people how "Knows Word", can't use any of the feature beyond changing the font and font size, not even the "headings".

For product like Microsoft Office (or whatever it's called these days) 20% is ludicrously high. I'd guess more in the 1% - 2% range. Especially Word is way to complex for the needs of most people, Wordpad covers the needs of most home users. I also thinks that's where the recentment for the remaining features come from. It's not that there's some number of feature hiding in a corner that's the problem, it's that almost the entire application is "useless".

[troupo]

With Word especially (and probably with any software approaching anything that can be viewed as professional) the long tail is unbelievably long, and "users only care about 20% of your application" may actually become "users may only care about 20% where no two users share the same 20%". Here's Microsoft's own research on it from an era when people were actually doing research: https://web.archive.org/web/20080329042649/http://blogs.msdn...

--- start quote ---

Beyond the top 10 commands or so, however, the curve flattens out considerably. The percentage difference in usage between the #100 command ("Accept Change") and the #400 command ("Reset Picture") is about the same in difference between #1 and #11 ("Change Font Size")

--- end quote ---

The whole series is great: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn... and there's a presentation, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHiNeUTgGkk

[tonyedgecombe]

It often feels like the people who spend the most time in those applications are the ones least likely to explore the software’s capabilities.

I’ve lost count of the number of Word documents I’ve had to edit where the creator completely ignored styles and formatted every element individually.

[al_borland]

The only time I bothered with styles was when I was looking to create cohesive documentation for a large team, along with templates to help others create such documents.

Ironically, at the time the corporate templates didn’t even use styles. It was just a 5 page doc with all the different things a person might use, and we were expected to copy/paste what we wanted to get the proper formatting. This wasn’t officially stated, but that was the only way I could see to use it.

[johannes1234321]

It is a lot simpler to count the opposite.

Working with styles is relatively complicated (not hard, but distinct form pure wysiwyg picking font&size and hoc) and for most small documents doesn't have much of a benefit in the result.

For larger documents or professional work it's relevant, but by then people are used to adhoc ways

[bux93]

Styles are also b0rken in interesting ways. Have you ever tried to change the default style to justified, and headings to left-aligned? How does that work out for you in tables? Table styles in general lack all kinds of support. Auto-numbering in headings can theoretically be customized, but good luck trying to change it without following a step-by-step guide that ends up with the default numbering. Using styles is supposed to negate the need for empty lines, but the space-before and space-after properties are buggy, meaning you end up just putting an enter anyway. Empty lines also end up in headings since word often, but not always, understands that the 'enter' pressed after a heading should start a new 'normal' paragraph, rather than a mult-line heading. The keep-together, keep-with-next properties on tables/rows work only kind-of, rather than consistently. Good luck autonumbering tables, illustrations and such. Not to mention that if you work on a word document that has had its styles changed a few times, there's a lot of invisible vestigial stuff in there that will interfere with your new styles.

It makes you yearn for latex and xsl-fo(!).

[eszed]

Yup. Yup yup yup. Years ago (so I'm open to the idea that it's got better in the last decade or so - but if we're talking about Office, I will doubt your assertion) I used styles religiously, because I was a younger man who took pride in doing things The Right Way. Eventually, however, the number of times styles screwed themselves (or so it seemed) up eventually exceeded my patience, or my time available, to debug them. Now, I do it ad hoc, and haven't had page three look significantly different than page twelve in years.

If you want me to do it The Right Way, make sure that's a happy path, or I'm going to stop doing it.

[zwnow]

My state (Germany) recently switched away from Microsoft to open source solutions and public offices have week long delays due to employees not finding buttons they were used to. They expect a 1 to 1 copy of the Microsoft product. Training should be software independent. People need to be educated with computer basics, if they work in a field that requires the usage of computers. Having to go to some public office in my area already is notorious, now its even worse.

[mmmllm]

They had the week long delays before this switch :D - now they just found a good excuse

[thewebguyd]

> Training should be software independent.

Agree, and I see this problem in both non-tech users and even sysadmins on my team when I'm looking for new hires.

I'll get resumes of people that are seemingly great, but they really only learned a few specific tools and had no general understanding of theory or even what those tools were doing. I don't care if you "know" Ansible, I do care if you know why we use orchestration management in the first place, and what those ansible playbooks are doing. Tools come and go, but the principles remain.

Likewise with general users. Don't train how to use Word, train how to communicate clearly, format ideas, and share them with others using a computer. The tool is irrelevant

[nradov]

The type of education in fundamentals that would allow users to flexibly switch between office productivity applications requires a fairly high level of abstract thinking. Not everyone has that cognitive ability. Some struggle with anything more complex than executing a set procedure and would require years of remedial education to break out of that mindset.

[zwnow]

Maybe dont employ these people in positions that require a specific way of thinking then...

[nradov]

You're really missing the point. Most clerical jobs don't require that specific way of thinking. Major changes to office productivity applications are quite rare and it would be silly to hire for those jobs based on abstract cognitive abilities. Ability to reliably follow instructions is usually sufficient.

[zwnow]

Until... you change the software.

[BeFlatXIII]

> A large number of people how "Knows Word", can't use any of the feature beyond changing the font and font size, not even the "headings".

“Knows Word” and “familiar with Windows” are boilerplate résumé spam to match the keyword selection. No one actually is expected to follow up on those bullets.