I had my third visit on Friday with Sharon. I’m beginning to see that interoperability with Windows programs (and the Microsoft Office suite in particular) is a concept that a lot of people probably don’t understand. For example, Sharon wanted me to show her how to cut something from Excel and paste it into Word. Now, this is second nature to us “native” digital citizens, but it didn’t occur to Sharon that she could do this. Of course, cutting and pasting isn’t enabled in all programs, which annoys me to no end. This lack of complete interoperability therefore requires the user to have a rough idea what software programs are published by the same company to ensure cut-and-paste capability, which is oftentimes too much to expect of people.
This also speaks to the lack of knowledge of multitasking capability that I see among many users, as well. Sharon often closes out a program before going to another to look up information she needs in the first program. For all its other flaws, Windows does make it pretty easy to multitask. I wonder if older individuals don’t multitask because they grew up doing one thing at a time, whereas we youngn’s are used to doing 5 things at once.
Sharon also wanted me to show her how to create a new worksheet in an Excel workbook. I felt sympathy for her in this case, because I feel like this is one of the Office functions that don’t make much sense to me. When I first wanted to do this a couple years ago, I went to the “New” menu in Excel to create a new spreadsheet, but it wasn’t there. It turns out it’s under the “Insert” menu because the geniuses at Microsoft thought of course that’s where people would look. Why not have it in both places? I know Office doesn’t have commands under multiple menus, but I’d like to know their reasoning why. I don’t know if this particular situation has been fixed in Office Vista, but I doubt it. One thing that has always puzzled me about computers is why people put up with crappy hardware. I’m guilty of having done this in the past, but there’s one thing I won’t stand for—a balky mouse. It’s the height of frustration to have a mouse that either doesn’t move smoothly or that jumps randomly all over the screen. Sharon’s mouse does this and I don’t think it ever occurred to her to do something about it, especially since mice are a dime a dozen. I’m going to bring an extra mouse that I have at home and try it, and if there’s a problem with the driver I’ll try and fix that, too. I think this is another example of the passivity that is on exhibit when people use computers. In this case, you have someone who doesn’t take any foolishness from any of the students in the building and yet accepts a bad mouse.
