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Sep. 25th, 2012 07:09 pmBackground: a few weeks ago I finally got sick of my office computer (MS Office) and my netbook (OpenOffice) changing my formatting – my thesis has pictures and footnotes! I can’t spend time tweaking formatting every time I want to work! – so I bought MS Office for myself. (Adapt to my ecosystem rather than changing it, no matter how much I like the idea of open source.)
Now that word processors don’t frustrate me or cause resentment, I’ve noticed a few new features in Word 2010. My favourite is the little arrow up in the top-right corner that hides that ribbon-dodad-menu. Clicking on ‘Home’ or whatever will cause it to pop down, and it zips back up after I select whatever option I was going for. This is extra-useful on a netbook, where space is at a premium. I also enjoyed discovering how to add, link and auto-number captions, which makes it so much easier to manage all the images in this chapter.
Other things Word 2010 would do that I couldn’t figure out on OpenOffice: writing in ‘print layout’ view (seeing margins and stuff) but being able to hide the top and bottom margins, being able to use styles, levels and headings to quickly move through a large document (and using these settings to do a quick word count of a sub-section via outline mode). The contextual picture and image editing menus are also super-useful.
I feel a bit annoyed that I couldn’t keep supporting an open source package, but it was making my life difficult. And knowing that I’d have to spend 15 minutes re-sizing and shifting images, and fixing every footnote (superscript, OpenOffice, NOT THAT HARD) caused a low-level anxiety – like: I can’t work on the chapter, it’s going to be broken, augh hide from the broken thing – that did nothing to spur productivity. (Too bad I’m the kind of person who needs the proper tools to do anything. Thanks, brain.)
I also accidentally deleted solitaire from my netbook, which (it turns out) I highly recommend to any chronic procrastinators. Three or four times I’ve reflexively twitched to where solitaire should be, but really I’m not experiencing a dramatic reduction in my quality of life.
Another shocking productivity tool is logging in “workstation only” in my office. Amazing how much better I work when I’m not checking tumblr and twitter every 90 seconds to see if anything’s happened yet. One day I even started reading the BBC business news page about mergers and shit because I was avoiding my work so much.
Now that word processors don’t frustrate me or cause resentment, I’ve noticed a few new features in Word 2010. My favourite is the little arrow up in the top-right corner that hides that ribbon-dodad-menu. Clicking on ‘Home’ or whatever will cause it to pop down, and it zips back up after I select whatever option I was going for. This is extra-useful on a netbook, where space is at a premium. I also enjoyed discovering how to add, link and auto-number captions, which makes it so much easier to manage all the images in this chapter.
Other things Word 2010 would do that I couldn’t figure out on OpenOffice: writing in ‘print layout’ view (seeing margins and stuff) but being able to hide the top and bottom margins, being able to use styles, levels and headings to quickly move through a large document (and using these settings to do a quick word count of a sub-section via outline mode). The contextual picture and image editing menus are also super-useful.
I feel a bit annoyed that I couldn’t keep supporting an open source package, but it was making my life difficult. And knowing that I’d have to spend 15 minutes re-sizing and shifting images, and fixing every footnote (superscript, OpenOffice, NOT THAT HARD) caused a low-level anxiety – like: I can’t work on the chapter, it’s going to be broken, augh hide from the broken thing – that did nothing to spur productivity. (Too bad I’m the kind of person who needs the proper tools to do anything. Thanks, brain.)
I also accidentally deleted solitaire from my netbook, which (it turns out) I highly recommend to any chronic procrastinators. Three or four times I’ve reflexively twitched to where solitaire should be, but really I’m not experiencing a dramatic reduction in my quality of life.
Another shocking productivity tool is logging in “workstation only” in my office. Amazing how much better I work when I’m not checking tumblr and twitter every 90 seconds to see if anything’s happened yet. One day I even started reading the BBC business news page about mergers and shit because I was avoiding my work so much.
