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Featured Guest Blogger: Robert Mote

Motagg’s Blog by Robert Mote

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In my last post, I demonstrated how calculations are prepared using MS Word 2003. I get many engineers saying they would prefer to learn with Word 2007 or claim it is a better product. I am astounded to hear that they believe this but I also understand why they think that. I have gone through the process of learning to achieve the same result with Word 2007 and I would never claim Word 2007 is a better product. It is more problematic with graphic handling, the defaults are worse and there is more clicking action of the mouse button. Do not believe the hype.

Anyone who has gone through the computer age from the mid-1990’s is aware of the endless cycle of MS Office upgrading. It is looking stale now. We can expect a future of it too. The constant revision of MS Office products has strained credibility. Succeeding generations of engineers have given up on MS Word with each upgrade. “Upgrade” is not equal to “improved” or “better”. Upgrading to 2007 is fundamentally different to anything you have used before. Do you think you will get training from your company? I doubt it. Do you think it will be intuitive enough to learn on your own? Good luck!

Let’s rewind the clock and consider the selfish perspective of an engineering user, stuck in a time warp.

I am a Civil/Structural engineer in the drawing office of 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. Rightly or wrongly, this is what we’re teaching the incoming graduates to respect. To make life really interesting there is always the spectre 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 an overseas client where the client Lead Engineer insisted that the calculations were clear, presentable, visually driven, numbered, consistent and checkable. He wanted total confidence in our work. I tried 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. And it was intuitive. From the earlier age of WordStar word-processing, 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 applications. 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 visually driven so we could transcend the language barrier; we minimized the writing and the calculations looked like a natural extension of the traditional calcualtions I knew. 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 many engineers how to do what I was doing. At the end of the project, we concluded it was faster, more productive and engineers enjoyed the new method. 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 just 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  ‘upgraded’ Word 95 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 and 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 brain-storm session. 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?

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 (computeracy) 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. Many say 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.

Computer literacy cannot be inspired overnight with a new package. I am going to take the opportunity to create a new term ‘computeracy’. Computeracy is about knowing how use software to express yourself. Just as you learn to read and write through your formative years, we need to know how to use Word and Excel proficiently. It 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 sustainable path to a common standard for all engineers to follow.

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 of Word 2007 users with whatever they plan for Word 2010. It complicates unnecessarily.

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. The Microsoft team is focused on profit and market segments, not whether people actually use their product. They could turn a leaf and learn something Apple understood a long time ago, find the user, listen and learn from them; don’t invent it out of the head of the programmer.

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 to use MS Office so it is another end of the line and resetting the computer literacy clock to zero when they ‘upgrade’. There is no shortcut to quality, it is always hard work to learn, retrain and practice.

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 MS Office should ever listen to a structural engineer, they would hear this: rebrand Word 95 and call it WordEng. Let the engineers, as users, design the product over time towards the ideal desktop application we need. We would be able to integrate more drawing functions and improve equation features. There are so many little ways MS Office team could improve Word 95 and we would have a product that could grow deep roots. I bet a product like this would be popular outside the engineering profession as it would be methodical, simplified and intuitive.

As I type happily away in my Word 2003 and hear the chime of incoming email, there nothing is more aggravating than to get a Word 2007 attachment file that cannot be opened because I don’t have Word 2007. So I upgrade, right?  Sigh….

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