All articles in Word

Excel, usability, user interface, Word

IT Haiku Poetry

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According to Wikipedia, a haiku  is a short poem which uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition.

I have read haikus and as per the definition, they most often relate to nature. However, I think that our constant interaction with information technology sometimes brings out moments of searing clarity and other times a pensive mood, which can best be captured in the haiku format. Therefore I have tried my hand at creating some: Continue reading IT Haiku Poetry →

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Excel, tricks, Word

Word count Excel for authors

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I never started writing after a conscious decision. Tulagi Hotel, my 134,000 word novel, came about after I chanced to write the first chapter at the office, over an extended coffee break, and with no intention of making it into a full-fledged book.

But when it was published, I found myself writing short stories. In a span of six months, I wrote 16 stories. At this time, I became interested in tracking the word counts of the stories. This is interesting for two reasons: most short story competitions have word limits, and it is nice to know the progress of your Work in Progress (WIP) files. Of course you can just note the word count and manually copy it to an Excel sheet, but I thought to make that process automatic. I will explain how, and also, share my file under the CC-BY-NC license. Continue reading Word count Excel for authors →

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usability, Word

Fonts, fonts, fonts – have you checked yours lately?

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In the olden days we did not have to worry about fonts. There were Courier, Times New Roman and Helvetica, and a couple of more for special events. And with dot matrix printers, using fonts was not much of an option anyway. In a way I miss the days, as there was no hassle with anything related to the look of the text.

But with laser printers and Windows, everything changed.

Suddenly you had more fonts in your machine than you would ever need for business correspondence. In fact, you soon got lost with the fonts. TrueType technology also assisted in this boom of fonts. Now you could have a true what-you-see-is-what-you-get experience (up to a certain point of course). And the number of fonts on your machine grew as if the fonts would breed in the dark.  Continue reading Fonts, fonts, fonts – have you checked yours lately? →

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