Photo by Upyernoz
Do you have any deficiencies that you find dispiriting?
Me too.
I cannot play card games, for instance—I can never keep track of which cards have been played. To my mind, a given card could appear at any time, even if I played it myself in the last hand. I also despair of trivia contests, because even when I know the answer, my brain seems to lock up until someone else says it first. And speaking French—forget it. In my neighborhood, if you aren’t fluent, you just look like an idiot. Pah. Stupide comme le fromage.
It’s not that I have no talents. Once I was the only person who passed a driving test that involved backing around a line of orange cones. I’m also an expert at pretending not to be ticklish. Probably to this day my children think I’m not, because years ago, with superhuman determination, I was able to hide my pain and hysteria so the sadistic toddlers would go away.
Okay, to the point. (Clue: it’s one I’ve hammered on before.) Why, oh why, would a person whose job involves sitting all day at a computer working in MS Word, why would that person choose not to learn how to do it well? Why would that person ever, ever, choose to drift from the keyboard over to the mouse, mosey the cursor up to the top menu, click on View, and meander down to Footnotes—six hundred times a day? Multiply this by all the common functions a person accesses via those menus, and by my math, this amounts to way more time than we have before we die. And to spend it all in mindless repetition? How could that person not hate her job?
Skill is a relative concept, and there are plenty of word-processing tasks I haven’t mastered. But I feel it’s fair to say that any copyeditor who works for money and doesn’t use shortcuts for the most basic typing functions is not only making life difficult for himself—he’s cheating his employer by wasting time.
To find, replace, copy, cut, paste, toggle tracked changes on and off, single-space or double-space, make italic or roman, switch from normal to print view—you know which chores you do most often. Yes, they’re called “work,” but work doesn’t have to be that hard.
It is much more fun and rewarding and ethical to be good at your work. It’s easy to search online for “MS Word shortcuts.” Don’t be overwhelmed by the lists—most of the items won’t apply to your work at all. Learn just one or two tricks at a time.
I promise you’ll be tickled with the results.
Oh, I'm so glad to know I'm not the only one ... who's like that about playing cards!
Posted by: Elainasaunt | 06/22/2011 at 07:54 AM
Thanks for the plug, Carol!
Posted by: Ebrenner | 06/22/2011 at 08:45 AM
Whenever I find myself doing the same thing more than a couple of times a week, I hunt it up in the app's help file or through a Google search to find either a shortcut or a way to automate it. Word macros and Photoshop actions are great ways to automate. InDesign is trickier, because unless you can find a script already written for what you need to do, you have to write one. But I have to make a four-column text box about a dozen times a week, so investing a few minutes in writing the script was well worth it. Then assign a key command to the script. Half a second to place, size, and format. Gotta love it.
Posted by: Kristen Stieffel | 06/23/2011 at 07:41 AM