Computers and productivity
- Thread starter The_Doc_Man
- Start date
As a more serious note, and this ties in to the AI thread:
Let's consider MS Office as a productivity tool. In essence, the greatest power of these tools isn't to compose. Oh, composition is an important task. But correction of anything from minor errors to a complete change of direction? Can you imagine what a tube of "white-out" looked like for the scribes who kept records on cuneiform tablets?
Office tools allow you to make selective fixes and rebuild your document, presentation, analysis, database, schedule, ... whatever you've got. The power of productivity is the ability to shoot from the hip on a given document, thus letting the creative juices flow. THEN you go back and fix the little boo-boos. And you can mark them for later if you have to think about them first.
I know when i do my hobbyist writing, my touch-typing skills are good enough on a computer keyboard that I can compose on-the-fly. Not with 100% precision, but the flow of thoughts hits a more permanent medium. When the flow of story events reaches a stopping point (i.e. the scene runs out, closes, something shifts direction), I can stop and go back to catch the little stuff. For some of my best work, that sometimes represented as many as three chapters at a sitting. That ability is why I think Office software is a great tool for productivity. But it is not perfect.
One of my pet peeves is that Office tries to HELP you - and invariably screws it up. I have to turn off about half of the stuff that Office does and I curse at every "gotcha" that crops up (under my breath if wife is in the room, although she might have choice words herself when discussing Word). When writing fiction involving dialog of a character with an accent or dialect, the little red and green squiggly underscores light up my screen like it was the middle of Christmas! And let's not talk about what spell-checking does to your character names, particularly Dwarf or Elf characters.
I will agree that judicious use of Office support software increases productivity. I made a career out of filing government reports quickly, integrating tables, charts, lists, and prose into a single document. Got a reputation of being a fast worker because of it. But until the grammar-checking software gets better AI, I have to turn it off or at least turn it way down to get anything done.
Let's consider MS Office as a productivity tool. In essence, the greatest power of these tools isn't to compose. Oh, composition is an important task. But correction of anything from minor errors to a complete change of direction? Can you imagine what a tube of "white-out" looked like for the scribes who kept records on cuneiform tablets?
Office tools allow you to make selective fixes and rebuild your document, presentation, analysis, database, schedule, ... whatever you've got. The power of productivity is the ability to shoot from the hip on a given document, thus letting the creative juices flow. THEN you go back and fix the little boo-boos. And you can mark them for later if you have to think about them first.
I know when i do my hobbyist writing, my touch-typing skills are good enough on a computer keyboard that I can compose on-the-fly. Not with 100% precision, but the flow of thoughts hits a more permanent medium. When the flow of story events reaches a stopping point (i.e. the scene runs out, closes, something shifts direction), I can stop and go back to catch the little stuff. For some of my best work, that sometimes represented as many as three chapters at a sitting. That ability is why I think Office software is a great tool for productivity. But it is not perfect.
One of my pet peeves is that Office tries to HELP you - and invariably screws it up. I have to turn off about half of the stuff that Office does and I curse at every "gotcha" that crops up (under my breath if wife is in the room, although she might have choice words herself when discussing Word). When writing fiction involving dialog of a character with an accent or dialect, the little red and green squiggly underscores light up my screen like it was the middle of Christmas! And let's not talk about what spell-checking does to your character names, particularly Dwarf or Elf characters.
I will agree that judicious use of Office support software increases productivity. I made a career out of filing government reports quickly, integrating tables, charts, lists, and prose into a single document. Got a reputation of being a fast worker because of it. But until the grammar-checking software gets better AI, I have to turn it off or at least turn it way down to get anything done.