The Mote Method

Did you Upgrade? Don’t!

December 1, 2009

Have you Upgraded to MS Office 2007?

 Everyone who has followed the computer age must be thinking the endless cycle of MS Office upgrading is looking stale now. We can expect a future of it too. The constant revision of MS Office products is straining credibility. Let’s consider this from the selfish perspective of an engineering user, stuck in a time warp.

 Let’s take a case in point. I am a Civil/Structural engineer that mostly works in the drawing office for a large engineering house in the Oil and Gas business. I am in a business that still prides itself on being a pen and paper tradition. And for the most part, rightly or wrongly, this is what we’re teaching the incoming graduates to respect. To make life really interesting there is always the specter of the boss looking over your shoulder, worried you were wasting time on unproductive tools like MS Word.

 My story begins back in 1997, I worked on a major refinery project for overseas client where the client Lead Engineer insisted that the calculations were clear, presentable, visually-driven, numbered, consistent and checkable. He wanted to be confident in our work. I had the opportunity to find a way to achieve this using Word 95. I grew up on Word 95 and found a way for it to work spectacularly in preparing my calculations. From the previous age of WordStar wordprocessing, this was a stellar improvement.

  I was effectively using Word 95 as a desktop tool. We planned the headings, preparing much of it in advance; we reduced the burden of inputs, moved bulky information to appendices and focused on summarizing and collecting the salient points of the analysis, whether it was from Excel, MathCAD, STAADpro or other third party application. We used the calculation as the starting point for the designers and built in checklist for multi-disciplinary issues and for the checker. The most important feature of the calculation was to be visual; we minimized the writing and the calculations looked like a natural extension of the traditional ways being refreshed with technology. You could flip through the pages and all you would see were diagrams, numbers and a logical flow. It was all commonsense, practical, educational and prolific. 

This so impressed the client engineer that the method was rolled out across the project and I was training engineers how to do what I was doing. At the conclusion of the project, we found it was faster, more productive and engineers enjoyed the new methodology. The checking exercise was easier and the confidence level and interaction within the team was high. We had engineers wanting to join the large project to have the chance to learn. It was the way to go.

The project finished and everyone went their separate ways to new projects, new offices armed with new skills. MS Office then ‘upgraded’ Word to Word 97. The defaults were changed and different routines were incorporated for embedding graphics, indexing and so on. The engineers, who had barely learned a new methodology, fell at the first hurdle didn’t recognize how to do what they had learned to do before. In their new project environment, surrounded by new skeptics, they shrugged their shoulders and gave up and reverted to the old ways.

By the time Word 2003 came along, it took me nearly eighteen months to find my way back to what I was doing before. In my opinion, Word 2003 is in no way better than Word 95. So why did MS Office bother to upgrade?

The truth is, people and businesses buy the technology and the software supply is all wrapped up in the hardware deal, even if they don’t know how to use the software and only use it if they have to. Isn’t there something wrong with that picture? Yes, the MS Office developers are aware of this so they did another pow-wow. Something is clearly wrong with the old ways, even the programmers hate the old Word packages and no one wants to be a plumber on an old package; hardly the stuff of legends is it? They asked themselves, is it possible to create a MS Office product that people want to use?  Word 2007 was born.

The advertising, the hype, the rave reviews and the excitement in the wake of Word 2007 did not work for the engineers. Just another day in the bizarre world of yet more change for the sake of change and professional pride. So can you imagine taking what you know in earlier Word versions and going into Word 2007 with enthusiasm? This is another excuse for a Babel Tower again. In no way is Word 2007 better or faster than Word 2003.

The defaults in Word 2007 are worse than Word 2003, which are in turn worse than Word 95. I am about to shrug my shoulders and give up using MS Word altogether. 

In truth, I have found a way, but I am shaking my head in profound sadness. The MS Office team is doing nothing to advance the opportunity to achieve a minimum of computer literacy within our profession. We are more than twenty years into the desktop computer age and engineers do not know how to use Word. The constant upgrade challenges people to change and most will resist at the best of times. I am in a losing battle with the proposition that we can transition our pen and paper tradition to better ways with a strategic method using Word XXXX. Literacy cannot be inspired overnight with a new package. Literacy takes years of constant use and then a few more years to find the courage to share your ideas with your colleagues and then a few more years to agree the best practices and a collective way to perform.

So what can I recommend? If I could have ten minutes with the MS Office team what would I tell them? Nowadays, MS Office are into exciting new tools like Project but they are overlooking the fact that Word 2007 is not going to change anything except to get ready to frustrate the current generation on Word 2007 users with whatever they plan for Word 2010. It complicates unnecessarily. From a selfish perspective, I want to continue to use Word 95. There was nothing wrong with it.

Dating a product, implies Word 2007 is better than Word 2003 is better than Word 95. So the user will go out and buy the upgrade. The wheels of business must keep turning. MS Office would be horrified if nobody advanced beyond Word 95.  Using the same product for fifteen years is not the way for MS Office to make money.

By analogy, I don’t have a great distance to go between point A and point B just across town so I will use my moped and take the shortcuts I know. Over time, the shortcuts get blocked and one way signs appear. The route is getting longer to my objective but I have a car now so it works out to be a little different. Now the road is dug up and a new flyover is built and I have to work out how to get onto the flyover first to go a little distance and get off again. Now, I need to pass a driving test as well. You know what, forget it, I will leave the car at home and walk.

When I tell engineers I can teach them how to use Word 2003 to produce calculations prolifically; many will say, I know Word 2003 I want to know how to use Word 2007. They know how to use Word 2003? And now they cheerfully want to use Word 2007? I should call their bluff on Word 2003 because Word 2007 is so far off the radar screen in terms of practicality, defaults and usability! You have to retrain. And in my business, companies do not train engineers in anything to use MS Office so it is another end of the line and resetting the literacy clock to zero.

Many engineers will try to discover Word 2007 but how many engineers have bought the reference manuals and it sits at home gathering dust?

If I were MS Office, I would rebrand Word 95 and call it WordEng. Let the engineers, as users, design the product over time towards the ideal desktop application we were looking for, before Frontpage got hijacked by Publisher in the internet war of html. I would ensure the question of literacy and competency is addressed over the longer period of time. I bet a product like this would be popular outside the engineering profession as it would be methodical, simplified and intuitive. There are so many little ways MS Office team could improve Word 95 and we would have a product that grow deep roots.

Nothing is more aggravating than to get a Word 2007 attachment file that cannot be opened because you don’t have Word 2007. So you upgrade, right? 

That was Word 2007, don’t get me started on Excel 2007.

Filed under: General Rant, Word Defaults

Tags: civil/structural engineers, Excel, MS Office 2003, Office 2007, spreadsheet, Word, Word 2003