Do you also prefer MS Excel over MS Word?
Never thought that I would be setting preferences between MS office tools. But my working style surely did!
How many of you use MS Word or Google docs for your work assignments?
Do you also think that they are complex to work on, just like some messy structure?
Are we too consumed with MS PowerPoint and MS Excel that MS Word is just our last resort?
I have been working on projects and college assignments since 2013 and in the last 9 years, I haven’t used this document tool much. It’s not that I don’t know how to use this tool, it’s just with the vibe of this tool that I refrain from using this.
My major concerns were:
The document creation is a task. Formatting keep going for a toss and alignment is a time-consuming activity
This tool doesn’t offer a good presentation. Reading through documents and sometimes finding relevant information takes good time (more so if the document is boring and lengthy)
Every basic detail has to be articulated in easy words and a proper flow has to be maintained for quick understanding.
Data plugged into the table is so difficult to align sometimes, that it becomes two pages long and difficult to have a bird's eye view.
Before most of you start saying that a document tool is not meant for presentation and it's simple to jot down points, I agree with it and I kinda found my alternative options for this. Maybe it’s my obsession with other tools or their quick usage that got on my nerves.
So What I do instead?
If the project is numerically based, I have always resorted to excel sheets and formatted them in a way that looks easy to read, consume and discuss within the team.
If there is a document or process flow chart that has to be prepared, I use PowerPoint (portrait mode) to quickly plug all the information, align the text and pictures, convert the document into the PDF version and share it across.
Soon enough, it turned into one of my habits and document tool usage went out of my practice. It was simple and well known that if you want me to create a document, I will hardly open MS word for you. But, things started to change when I joined this start-up where collaborations happened over the Google workspace and documents are widely used for project planning. People find it easy to jot down points and discussion documents in Google Docs. I struggled to accept this change for me and tried to adjust until this incident happened.
Our team of 4 people were working on a project and we had to answer 4 defined questions for all the processes we were reviewing in the team discussions. The team lead created a collaborative document where everyone kept plugging their thoughts after each session. When the 5 sessions were over and it was time to prepare a summary, I was surprised looking at that lengthy document. The length of the document created a mirage that we have a lot of points and ideas to plug against each session because everyone has together filled it. To sync my thoughts and also prepare a glance summary, I resorted to my tactic of using an excel sheet as the data was easy to present in a tabular format.
What surprised me was that as I created that table, the table had many blank cells. The document which was looking so big to summarize in my head, we had missed some questions to discuss or maybe jot them down during the chat.
This incident reinforced my concerns and a bad experience of using Docs. And now not only I, but even my teammates have shifted to excel sheets and PowerPoint. I can guess so because now I receive a lot of collaborative documents as sheets instead of docs. I still believe that documents can be an efficient way of writing your thoughts, diary or stories, but maybe not be a great tool for corporate projects.
Do you also relate to this feeling of preferring Sheets/ PowerPoint over docs? Tell us your thoughts/ suggestions in the comments section.