To take a brief break from the education policy debate, I thought I would take everyone on a brief journey through a smaller though no less important question. Specifically, should I make a move away from my reliance on Microsoft Office?
“Why would you ever do that?”, you may fairly ask. For one, I like to be different and EVERYONE has Microsoft Office… (How can I really feel unique when I too rely on .doc, .docx and .ppt). Second, because that is not a legitimate reason at all for a massive change of writing approach, I have been persuaded to give it a shot for productivity reasons by the arguments of Alan Jacobs in his new blog “Text Patterns.” Jacobs is an English professor at Wheaton College, an avid blogger and twitterer, and a phenomenal writer and cultural critic.
In analyzing the Microsoft package and his subsequent behavior change, Jacobs writes:
I think Microsoft Word (for the Mac, anyway) reached its highest level at version 5.1, released in 1991, and started sliding precipitously downhill thereafter. Long ago I came to agree with Louis Menand: “It is time to speak some truth to power in this country: Microsoft Word is a terrible program.” But unlike Menand, I not only spoke such truth, I acted on it. About four years ago I deleted Word, and indeed all Microsoft applications, from my computer. And I have been a happier man ever since.
It seems that the major line of reasoning for a “Bare Bones” approach is its stripping away of the distractions of writing. Given that I already have a hard time staying focused on one topic (See: this blog), I thought for my dissertation it might be a good idea to give myself as fair a shot as ever to stay focused.
And so today, I have decided to give Jacob’s one-two punch of BBEdit **to write** and iWork **to format** a try for a month. Each has a 30 day free trials before I have to fork up any cash ($50 for the academic version of BBEdit and $79 for an individual version of iWork), so the costs of de-Microsoft Officing myself for a short period of time are minimized. As for the benefits… Will it be worth it? Will I have increased productivity? When will the detox start to show itself in symptoms? …stay tuned!
Dec. 20, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Peter, thanks for the commentary — and FYI, unless you’re doing some heavy HTML coding, the free version of BBEdit, Text Wrangler, is likely to be all you need.So that’ll save you a wad.
Dec. 20, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Thanks Alan
Ill do the text-wrangler instead.
I guess my biggest concern about the switch is whether it will end up adding more inconvenience than I will gain in productivity with trying to coordinate with the system at Wash U (We are all on office… co-authors tend to use the same). However, if there is a better option, I also don’t just want to be constrained by the system around me!
pb
Dec. 21, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Also there are free Office alternatives. I’ve heard from a friend down here that OpenOffice.org from Mac is better than Office for Mac. May want to give that a shot.