Big-Ups to Microsoft Office Suite
Office Suite… Should I say ‘Proficient’ or “Advanced’?
I used to make fun of the idea of putting ‘Microsoft Office Suite’ on a resume. It’s the ultimate space filler. If you know how to turn on a computer, you know how to use Microsoft Word. If you can type letters on a page, well, you can probably type numbers into a spreadsheet too.
PowerPoint? Best known for two things:
- Gaudy effects
- Boring corporate presentations
Hold the damn phone
Word is no joke
As a biostatistics grad student, I ran the gamut in terms of new-age tools for writing statistical reports. R Markdown/knitr, LaTeX, Overleaf… All very cool.
A few years ago, I nearly fell out of my chair when I realized you could write LaTeX formulas directly into Word. Check me out:
Word is sort of bamboozling LaTeX here, because you can write the same formula, but it immediately appears as the actual formula (not code). Many of the new-age tools can also render formulas on the spot, but you’re still typically looking at a code/report hybrid rather than a report, while you’re writing.
Personally, I think Word — well, word processors of the “what you see is what you get” variety in general— are huge time savers. You open a document and start writing. With programming-based tools, you spend tons of time debugging, formatting, etc.
PowerPoint is good
Like reports, the statistics community favors alternatives to Microsoft’s product. Beamer seems to be the industry standard (i.e. what most people use for conference talks).
I recently decided to use PowerPoint for a quick presentation — I didn’t feel like re-learning syntax and ‘code-compile-check-’ing hundreds of times.
I was pleasantly surprised. First, PowerPoint has a really nice “snappy grid” for aligning content on the page. It’s great for aligning back-to-back figures for good visual comparisons, e.g. to highlight Netflix’s huge growth since 2010:
It’s nothing revolutionary, but it’s a cool feature that seems to work great for aligning tables, figures, and text boxes.
Moving to something more exciting, the ‘Screen Recording’ feature is awesome. You just go to Insert… Screen Recording and follow the instructions. When you’re finished recording (with audio if you want!), the video appears right there in your slides. If you want, you can also save it as a video and upload directly to Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.
Pay to play
While I’m impressed with the current state of Microsoft Office, I don’t actually think the annual subscription model is sustainable. In this day and age, these tools are pretty ubiquitous. I can’t imagine any feature Microsoft could add to its products that wouldn’t be easily copied by its competitors. This stuff just isn’t that complicated.
That said, Microsoft is currently killing it.
