Slashdot Mirror
Read a Good Word Processing Book Lately?
An anonymous reader asks: "I'm a computer lab assistant at a small state college, and as such I help students with their MS Office coursework. This coursework is designed to make them operable in the open market, and help familiarize them with the word processing / spreadsheet environment. Unfortunately, it gives them a one sided perspective from a Microsoft standpoint, and the text is very unclear on the assignments. Are there any suite-independent, clear textbooks on word processing available out there?"
I know this isn't quite an answer.
But teaching LaTeX to students would probably give them a considerable edge in some fields --- most notably in some math and science fields --- and would also keep them from getting tied to any specific program.
Word may be pretty, but LaTeX can do all the same stuff. Really.
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
Teach them some basic linux stuff... how to boot in and use kde/gnome/etc. Show them a dumb linux terminal and how to use it. oh, and tell them about RTF.
Sig you!
In any case, you don't learn to use a word processor by reading a book. You learn by writing documents. A good text supports this activity, and thus has to refer to a specific WP.
If you really want your students to be vendor-agnostic you should train them to do similar tasks on a variety of word processors. But I suspect that your students will rebel at this approach. They'll want skills that look good on a resume. And what looks good on a resume is experience with specific apps, not generalized skills.
That's not a good thing, of course. It means that well-entrenched but badly-designed apps like Word and FrameMaker will continue to dominate. And it also means that employers will tend to prefer rote learners for jobs that probably require a degree of adapability and creativity. But you're not going to change these things just by insisting that your students learn WPs they'll never get a chance to use.
Teach them these two and they would be set for life: learning on how to write man pages and learning on how to write manuscripts for publication.
I have to say that you can not learn to use a Word processor without using it. No exercises in the world can replace creating real documents. Make your students use the word processor to write reports for other subjects or something.
When we are discussing word processors in general, there are some points that are extremely important to learn. These are the points that (IMHO) differs an average user and a user who knows how to use a word processor properly:
* Use paragraph (and in text) formatting. Learn to define styles, how to change the apperance of a document after having written it. Proper use of the formatting tools also gives free indexes and TOCs.
* Use the different modes of the application to see the document: outline, preview, layout, etc.
* Learn to fully use tabs, align around them, define hanging sections, etc.
* Learn proper layout. Narrower columns, only one, perhaps two fonts. Less is more, etc.
There are several more points to add to this list, but these are the ones that I can take from the top of my head...
I understand why you don't want to tie them to MS, but there's a time and a place. Maybe if you finish the course early, or if you seem to have a quick class, you can show them around the competing open source products near the end.
Any book that is technical in nature and is simply teching you how to use a suite is obviously going to be applicable to only one program, but if you give them a book about what to do with it, they will gain knowledge that can be used in any environment, and which will probably help them out more in the long term than learning what every menu command in suite x does. I highly recommend Robin Williams's classic The Mac Is Not a Typewriter: A Style Manual for Creating Professional-Level Type on Your Personal Computer . The revised editon will be available this spring, and The PC Is Not a Typewriter is available now.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
I teach a high school "computer applications" course. In addition to larger projects where we go over how to do specific things in specific applications, we also do some "pop-quiz" type work.
Students are given a program that they probably have not used before and an example of a document (letter, movie, presentation...) that was made with that program. They have from one to three days to figure out how to use the program and produce whatever the assignment for that program is.
Three days isn't a lot of time at 50 minutes a day, and they started out REALLY hating this. But they have discovered that they can figure out new programs on their own, and have started to enjoy it.
They are not totally out in the cold. They have the help files and they can ask their classmates for help. Those are the things they are likely to have in real life when the boss comes in and tells them that they have to give a presentation at the meeting tomorrow
Realistically, there's no program that we can teach in high school that is going to be the same as the programs they are going to be using in the workforce in 5 years, so working on figuring out new programs seems like a good choice.
Teach them to separate content from presentation.
Learning bad habits like inserting tabs to indent paragraphs and signature blocks is not good. Sure it was fine when you used MultiMate in 1990, but it's a whole new century baby...
Teaching them about styles will pay off. Of course, Microsoft Word has a pretty spoogy way of creating and formatting styles which makes many people give up.
Once they learn how to make and apply styles, teach them how to template.
These are the two most useful (and time saving) skills you can learn with MS Word, plus they have implications in programming.
Oh, and if they're using Microsoft Excel, make sure to teach them how to use functions EARLY. Don't ask me how many times I've caught people tallying a column of numbers with a calculator in order to type the answer at the bottom of a spreadsheet...
One other skill they should learn is how to use version control software. There's a version of RCS that works quite nicely with Microsoft Word. Speaking from experience, version control is a technology whose time has come in the office. Every serious Word Processor I've worked with keeps backups of documents at critical stages (mostly out of self-defense). I've seen people reduced to tears because they've made edits to a document and then told to 'go back to the way it was'.
My father is a blogger.
In an ideal world, this would always be the right way. Thinking skills and adaptability is more important than having a nice set of technical buzzwords on your resume. At least that's what I look for when my boss asks me to interview a job candidate.
Unfortunately, we're not talking about a high school, where the teachers have a captive audience and a mandate to develop their students' intellectual skills. We're talking about a computer lab where unemployable people come to grab the skills that will make them employable. Which means the buzzword-resume factor is important, even vital. Because most interviewers are a lot more buzzword-oriented than I am. And because the students are people who have to carefully allocate their learning time.
So thinking skills have to take a back-seat to buzzword compliance. If you can sneak them in, fine. But you can't make them the thrust of your teaching, or you'll lose your students.
Ask their classmates for help? What do you think happens when there only happens to be one or two technically savvy pupils in the class, as in my situation? Do you really think the experienced kids will help the less experienced? Nuh-uh. They'll take the Dilbert route out and give bad advice, and that doesn't really help people to learn.
"Uh...how can I put this picture in the middle?"
"Oh, that's easy. Just hold down F4...now press Alt."
People looking for word processor and spreadsheet work must know Word and Excel.
Unless you are their instructor, I'd lay back. Answer any questions that come our way, but don't roll out an alernate list of readings. Let them spend the time trying to get an edge with the two programs the business world thinks are synonymous with word processing and spreadsheets.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I'm not saying the idea C/P separation is bogus (though many Slashdotters would). In point of fact, I work in technical communication, where the C/P separation is essential. (I'm also getting an object lesson in the consquences of ignoring the issue: I'm helping XMLify a huge RTF document base that should have been converted to markup a decade ago.) But not every letter, term paper, or personal web page needs such an elaborate approach. Especially when the student is working with Microsoft Word, which does a particularly lousy job of helping separate presentation from content.
Maybe I am missing something key here, but, why are businesses still using word processors? Wouldn't it make more sense and money to "code" business documents in a semantic language (SGML, XML, DocBook, whathaveya...), and then generate the final output with a filter?
It would make more sense. If you generate all of your documents in a semantic language, they are easy to sort, search and archive. Document management would be much simpler and more effective. No digging for text in binary documents, no need to read 10 versions each of 20 document formats. No need to chase new formats every year. Your marketing department can whip up the style-sheets for the 10 or 20 document types that people actually write (memos, reports, press releases, etc.) so they all look consistent. Documents from different OSs, coded by different editors would be 100% interoperable.
It would make more money. You wouldn't have to buy Word. You wouldn't have to buy Word again next year. You wouldn't have to train your employees to use Word, and then train them again for the next version. (You would have to train them once, to use DocBook, or whatever.) You wouldn't be stuck with one expensive operating system. Even if you used windows because you liked it, you wouldn't be STUCK with it.
Why are companies still wasting money on word processors?
I have a co-worker is quite aware of the C/P concept. In fact, we hired him for his XML expertise! But when he uses Word, he still makes all the mistakes you describe, because he has better things to do with his time than fight with Word's obscure and poorly documented feature set.
Remember, Content-Presentation separation isn't an end in itself. It has various purposes, but the one that matters to Word users is making large documents maintainable. And the way to teach newbie Word users about maintainability is to introduce them to formatting, then show them how encapsulating formatting in styles makes a document more maintainable. That's something they can see and understand. If you lecture them about content management abstractions like Content-Presentation separation, they'll have no context in which to place these concepts, and they simply won't retain them.
Of course, Content-Presentation separation serves other purposes, like making large technical document bases maintainable and delivering content in multiple formats (HTML, PDF, etc.). But if these purposes are important to your project, you shouldn't be using a word processor at all.
I've just finished 6 weeks of 'advanced' Word and Excel at our local tech college. Once a WordXP document gets too complex it rearranges itself because the network admin won't install service packs for officeXP. it sucks. Some of the other students hadn't done much computer work and were mostly struggling. We were taught the quick click method with little understanding of what was happening. Now We're doing Access I'm parralleling the course personally with PostgresQL. Why don't you load Office and OpenOffice, teach the knowledge behind the clicks, then let the students decide which works better or easier.
Go well
This is late to the party. Hope you see this. I wish you had provided an email where I could reach you.
No, there aren't any office suite agnostic books out there that are worth your time. I've looked.
_Running Microsoft Office_ is my recommended reference for that suite, but it's not a great teaching book.
I've developed my own materials that I present in the Intro to Computers class I teach. Here's the outline in a nutshell. It's everything you need to use any word processor. You can flesh it out to actually present yourself.
Essential Word Processor Skills
I. Enter & Edit Text
A. Delete & Backspace Keys
B. Arrow Keys
C. Word Wrap & Enter Key
D. Selecting Text
E. Cut, Copy, & Paste
F. Undo & Redo
II. Layout
A. Justification
B. Margins
C. Tabs
D. Tables
E. Headers & Footers
III. Format
A. Text Properties
i. Typeface (Maximum of two per document: 1 heading and 1 body text)
ii. Size
iii. Bold, Italic, & Underline
iv. Text, Highlight, & Background Color
B. Indenting, Number, & Bullets
C. WordArt (Stress this should rarely be used)
IV. Tools
A. Save, Save As, & Open
B. Print Preview, Page Setup, & Layout Views
C. Spell Check
D. Options (tell them they're there, point to Help for more info; very app specific)
V. Workflow
A. Save Regularly
B. Enter Text
C. Layout Text
D. Format Text
E. Spellcheck & Edit Text
This all seems very basic, I'm sure. In fact, most people who have been using computers for years still don't know this stuff. My experience has shown the outline above cover the essentials people have to know. Don't leave anything out, but don't add anything either.
You can cover it all in an hour if you rush. Ideally, you create some exercises for each topic and cover a couple topics per class (Enter & Edit Text, Layout, etc.). Stress the Workflow from the beginning and at each topic, this is where most people do the most damage. They type some, format it, type some, format it... until the document looks and reads like a ransom note and weird formatting errors abound. Then they lose it all when the program crashes because they haven't saved since they started typing.
The essential topics any Intro to Computers class should cover, IMHO, are Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Windows/Operating System, Hardware & Software Components, Computer History & Current Business Usage, Internet & LAN (including Netiquette), and Security.
I could go on for a long time about this stuff. I've developed all my own materials because what is generally available is crap. Someday I'll post it to the web under the OCL, but it's mostly up in my head right now. Hopefully I've given you enough to start from.
Good Luck!
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies