The more technically inclined a person is, the harder it is for that person to realize what an “average” user knows or doesn’t know. Having worked one-on-one with many high school seniors in the past month or so, I’ve had an interesting insight into their knowledge and habits regarding MS Word. The following is a brief list of some of the things I have noticed.
- The most commonly known keyboard shortcuts are for copy and paste. Maybe 2/3 of users know and use those two shortcuts. Most users do not use any other keyboard shortcuts.
- Most users do not know how to create a page break and simply rely on pressing enter until their cursor has moved to a new page.
- About half of users do not use the delete key (instead relying on the right arrow and backspace keys).
- Many users type in a number (e.g., “1″) directly into the header for the page number without realizing that it will show that number on every page.
- A few users do not know how to center text (instead relying on several presses of the tab key)
- Almost no users know how to fix Word’s auto-formatting. For instance, when completing an MLA citation, Word automatically removes the less-than, greater-than, and period from the URL, then it links, colors, and underlines the URL. When a user doesn’t want this to happen, s/he becomes very agitated but has no idea how to fix it.
- Users do not pay any attention to the file extension or file format when saving (which is a major issue when working with the newest version of Word on some computers but not others).
- When a dialog comes up with only one choice (e.g., “Okay”), nearly all users click that choice without reading the dialog.
- The ribbon interface in Word 2007 confuses the hell out of most users.
In general, users want to get the work done as soon as possible, which means doing whatever they already know or whatever makes the most sense to them. They rarely look through menu choices to try to figure out how to do something such as how to format a paragraph. They don’t pay any attention to anything that they don’t need to pay attention to (e.g., the ruler). They commonly feel as though they are “fighting” the computer to get it to do what they want. The thought that there are alternative programs almost never occurs.
Overall, I’d say the biggest difference between an “average” user and someone who is truly technically literate is that the former never considers how his/her actions will be interpreted by the computer (assuming the computer should think in the same way as s/he does); the latter acts based on how the computer will interpret the action. Essentially, it’s the difference between talking to someone and talking at someone.
Ian,
I have to admit that I am one of those who don’t know how to do all those nifty things in Microsoft Word — not even page breaks.
Part of the problem might be that I originally used Corel Word and I liked it. It took me quite a while to become calm with Microsoft Word. I could have put Corel back on this hard drive but I decided that most of the people to whom I write have Microsoft (maybe all of them).
I do have an old Corel document that is the latest version of a manuscript. I can not forward it and have someone print it out because their printer will assume it is a Microsoft document and that affects the page breaks.
There is one flaw (from my way of thinking) in Microsoft Word that bugs me regularly and often. If you divide the page into columns and use the cursor down key, it will travel through column 1 on page one into column 1 on page two, ignoring the other columns on page 1. In Corel the cursor down key followed the text regardless of how many columns were on the page.
I hope you can teach those young folk a few useful tricks but I’d suggest you only mention one a week. Trying to do too many things at once leads to one’s throwing up one’s hands.
Robert
Robert,
To do a page break, simply hold ctrl and press enter. It’s also in the menu, but I find the shortcut is easy to remember since you would press enter anyway.
If that column problem is the only one that you run into regularly, consider yourself lucky! I’ve seen that issue along with a host of others due to columns and/or tables. I haven’t played around with the ‘07 version, so I’m not sure if they’ve fixed any of it, but I have always found that semi-complex layouts are too much for Word to handle. Of course, it wasn’t originally intended to do most of these things, so it’s not surprising that there are so many issues, especially since it really shouldn’t be used as a tool for controlling layouts.
The class that I most encounter these sorts of issues in is mostly a one-on-one class, so I give little tips here and there. I try to avoid teaching too many keyboard shortcuts unless I can make them memorable easily. Otherwise I try to stick to building a logical thought process (“Okay, so you want to format your paragraph, right?”), attempting to burn key thoughts/words into students’ heads.
@IanHehe, so true. Don’t forget double spacing! I personally know people who double space their papers by pressing enter twice at the end of each line and then spend hours re-formatting their papers each time they make corrections or re-word their sentences.
@Robert: funny that you mention this but the column issue you are experiencing is a direct outcome of the way word implements column layouts – and that’s by invisible funky markup and dynamic re-flowing of the text on the page. If you look at the document internally a page with a multi-column layout looks like this:
— Start Section Break for Column Layout Special Markup Command —
Your text
— End Section Break for Column Layout Special Markup Command—
When the document is rendered on the screen Word simply takes your text. Whenever Word sees these special markup commands, it simply takes the text in between them and evenly splits it so that it fits nicely in however many columns you have selected by calculating how many lines will fit on a page with the given font and margin settings.
Note that if you create an empty document with 2 column layout you won’t be able to tab or click over to the second column without actually pressing enter the special magical number of times until you hit the pre-calculated limit and the text flips over to the second column. Change the font face or size, and that number may change and your paintstakingly aligned text will get re-aligned and mess up your layout. You can control where you want the transition from column 1 to column 2 occur by inserting an invisible section break in there but few people know about this.
This is just how it works, but the WYSIWYG format makes it seem like it should work differently. This is a major pitfall of WYSIWYG is that it still uses markup which is invisible to the user.
I also used Corel in the past, and I agree that it was actually a better tool. It also allowed me to expose and edit all the “hidden” markup stuff when I wanted to.