WHY DO I USE MICROSOFT PRODUCTS BUT NEVER OPEN THEM

5 min readFeb 13, 2021

I love the Features and Functionality but I don’t love the Frustration

COMMON USE

While it wasn’t always the case, Microsoft Office products are the most commonly used form of software used by businesses to create all forms of documentation to support their businesses and clients. Over time, this Office family of products has become more sophisticated, more advanced, and produced more words, pages, and documents of ideas, thoughts and dreams.

OPTIONS, OPTIONS, AND MORE OPTIONS

As time has progressed and business and personal needs have increased, Microsoft has responded by building more features into the Microsoft Office product line. Many people will find some of these features useful, but some will become annoyed by them. These features include

offsite storage in cloud services;
editing of text, audio, image, photo, and video content;
copy and paste;
formatting and styles;
importing of various file formats;
exporting or production of various file formats.

COMPLEXITY

With features comes complexity and more difficulty in navigating and learning the system and its features. And, the user interface becomes more difficult as time progresses. This leads to the additional consumption of time and resources, but allows for more beautiful documents and content.

IT’S A PIG

My buddy Tom used to joke, while speaking at developer conferences, that you could find all the running Microsoft applications on a system by sorting the programs in Task Manager by Memory or other performance statistics. The Microsoft products would conveniently be displayed at the top, as top performers, because they use the most resources.

Author’s Note: I have nothing against Microsoft or other pigs. I love bacon.

MEMORIES

I have memories of hours gone by, watching hour glasses, frozen screens, waiting for the “program to respond” and be useful again. While Microsoft has improved their software over time, the general premise that more features means more complexity and more slowness persists to this day.

MENU OPTIONS

As time progresses, each Microsoft application has more features, and with more features, comes more menu options. And, with more options comes more time needed to find things, select features, and use features. And, this consumes time which is our most precious resource.

BEAUTIFUL

But, all that complexity leads to beautiful functionality, beautiful features, beautiful productivity, and beautiful products. Like all beautiful things, they are formed over time, in space, and become memories and ideas that are preserved for the ages. The pork, the peril, the punishment, combines to be something quite beautiful or pretty.

MY TIME IS LIMITED

My time on earth is limited, and I don’t know the limits. I know that I’m limited to so many waking hours per day, so many hours of sleep, so many hours of play, and so many hours to work. And, with each limit, I have stress. If any of these areas uses too much time, my life is out of balance. So, the stress of using Microsoft Office products led me to see a solution to this problem.

THE SOLUTION

The ideal solution is that I get all the features and benefits of all the Microsoft Office products without actually having to open and run them. Simplify the choices, the interface, and the options for a specific task, and then automate things so that I never have to see the actual Microsoft Office product interfaces again. We want simplicity surrounded by complexity and beauty.

WORKING EXAMPLE

One working example is the tool I’m helping create to write this article, this post, the publication, this newsletter, this video, and this podcast. The screen looks simple as pictured here, but the production of all of these files occurs using the Microsoft Office platform without me having to open and actually use the tools.

THE LESSON

There is a lesson behind all of this memory and performance madness. We all want the beauty, the flexibility, the opportunities, and the results that the complex provides, but we don’t want to invest the time learning and processing and doing that it takes to produce great things. So, if possible, we need to learn to automate and streamline the processes. We can have the dream, without the pain, and without the hurt.

ME

If I can help you eliminate the pain that Microsoft Office products introduce, while allowing you to realize the dreams and the journeys that you are yet to live, feel free to contact me for help. Feel free to follow, share, and like my ramblings at the links listed below: