MS Word seems easy, yet almost every legal professional is "fighting" with it. Learn why this is the case, and why you don't need to feel bad if you're also fighting this battle!
But first let us share the results of a poll we did among our customers: inhouse legal teams and large to mid-sizelaw firms. We asked them the percentage of time they were non-productive whenusing Word.
Apparently that percentage is on average 23%. That means that almost a quarter of all time spent in Word consists offighting with the tool, instead of productively using the tool.
The most common problems cited were:
The primary reason for the fight with Word is that almost no one reads the manual. Word seems like easy software — you just start typing, select some text and make it bold by clicking on a button. The less obvious things are learned from a friend or family member, or are learned “on the job” with a helpful colleague.
Users are not the only ones to blame: even extensive books on Microsoft Word spend only a few pages on those features related to long-document formatting. Most of the pages are filled with easy stuff, or topics that are not relevant for legal experts — such as how to format graphical newsletters. No wonder nobody reads the manual.
Then there's the problem that lawyers are not the only users of MS Word.
There are college professors, students, tennis club managers, staff writing reports, grandmas writing letters to their children, and so on. All of them have different needs and focus on different features of Word, from mail merge operations to creating graphically rich newsletters, or even creating websites.
Then there's the problem that lawyers are not the only users of MS Word.
There are college professors, students, tennis club managers, staff writing reports, grandmas writing letters to their children, and so on. All of them have different needs and focus on different features of Word, from mail merge operations to creating graphically rich newsletters, or even creating websites.
Microsoft was well aware of this problem. As nobody wants to learn the core principles, Microsoft added some simple layers with easy buttons that give the impression that you don't need to learn Word.
And for the simple situations, these buttons are indeed helpful, because you can create a bulleted list with one click. But for the more complex documents — and, let's face it, that’s what legal documents frequently are — these simple buttons are deceiving. But unlike the early versions of Word, you need to peel off several layers in the user interface to get to the core settings.
