Day: August 15, 2001

I think Bert Garcia must be trapped in the mid-1980s. Over at OSOpinion.Com he writes,

Ask yourself this question: Who uses all the applications in the MS Office suite? In a small business of let’s say 15 employees, maybe 10 have to type up a letter, two do occasional spreadsheets, one brave salesperson attempts a presentation and none want to tackle a database. Seems like a waste of disk space, not to mention license fees.

That’s certainly no workplace that I’ve been a part of. Where I work now, which is really a self-contained nonprofit of about 20 employees, everybody uses pretty much all of the applications. The receptionist I work with, for example, knows far more about MS Access than I ever want to learn. Everybody in my office is regularly using Excel, Word, Access and PowerPoint.

In my previous job, which was a small self-contained unit of 5 people where, again, everybody used all of these applications except for the manager who was computer illiterate.

And from what I see, a detailed working knowledge of the four main MS Office apps are a prerequisite for employment consideration.

One reporter/columnist I wish really had a weblog is the Washington Post‘s TV columnist Lisa de Moraes. Yesterday, Moraes zinged the “Today” show’s Katie Couric for crossing the line into advocacy at the end of a taped interview with relatives of confessed child killer Andrea Yates.

Katie Couric doesn’t need to leave the “Today” show and join the talk-show circuit to do on-air advocacy work on controversial subjects, à la Oprah or Rosie. She’s already doing it on “Today.”

Yesterday morning, for instance, at the end of a taped interview with the mother and brother of confessed child murderer Andrea Yates, Couric told viewers where to send contributions to the Texas woman’s defense fund; the address also appeared onscreen.

A “Today” show spokesperson told Moraes that the inclusion of the information didn’t represent advocacy, but the network clipped the defense fund information when it rebroadcast the segment later in the day.

Personally, I just don’t understand these morning shows. My wife likes them, but I find watching them to be an experience on par with visiting the dentist. Such shows tend to encapsulate all of the worst trends in television journalism and then take it to the next level of banality.