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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?"
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.
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.
Word may be pretty, but LaTeX can do all the same stuff. Really.
LaTeX can let me open up (or convert) my extant word document and start typing, using keyboard shortcuts or toolbars to denote what exceptions I want, and spit out word counts on demand?
LaTeX can track changes, spell check, and autocorrect common typoes that I make?
LaTeX can handle god damn'd em dashes!?
If so, please e-mail me a good link. If not, please don't say that it can.
If you want pretty, use Quark or Publisher or Acrobat's product (name?). If you want to write, use Word.