Misused and Misunderstood

I think Word is misunderstood and misused by many.

So I looked up what the official definition for Microsoft Word is, it is a word processing program. Suggesting that Word is used for typing, writing, communicating through words, hence why it is called Word.

Why is it then, that on countless occasions I have come across people trying to make menus, complex tables and more importantly diagrams and posters in Word? I could be wrong but I don’t think that Word should be used in this way; I don’t think this is what it was made to do. If you want to type a letter, or keep a diary, or write a list, or even make a mock newspaper etc then Word is for you. However the people at Microsoft have crated a combination of programs and have collectively called them Microsoft Office. They have not given you one program and said do everything; they have tailored programs to suite specific needs and therefore making our lives, as the customers, easier. So why is it that we insist on misusing the programs they provide us with? Today my Science lesson was to create a poster about MRSGREN, using pictures from clip art, using WordArt to make the text more exciting and this is to be done in Word. I am confident with the general tasks on a computer, for example making posters. Word is the last program that I would use for creating a poster. Most people would use publisher or something, at home I don’t have publisher and for creative projects I would use PowerPoint as it allows text and pictures to be easily inserted and moved around the pages, if you wanted to share many of the children’s posters that are on PowerPoint, you could create a slide show etc. In my lesson the children were having to put pictures into text boxes in order to move them around. Many children had a large box inserted that moved around their other work, so I was having to go round 30 children, insert the large text box, undo the large text box and then draw a small text box. I found it easier to move some children onto PowerPoint to overcome this problem. Yes you can not just type in PowerPoint, unlike in Word. But, when doing a poster most of the text the children insert is in WordArt and so they aren’t just typing anyway and so I can see no benefit of using Word.

Word, I remember being told, is linear, it responds to information being displayed in lines etc. PowerPoint however is not restricted in this way and so objects can easily be moved around, in Word they follow a strict alignment and so when inserting pictures etc they must follow the rules.

(The MRSGREN poster is my PowerPoint effort!)