Every time I type more than five words in the "Notes" column of a spreadsheet, I have to jump through several click-heavy formatting procedures-to wrap and left-justify the text, start the words from the top instead of the bottom, and make the font bigger than seven points. Perhaps there's a way to change the default setting, but I've never found it.
Another characteristic of spreadsheets is that they excel at auto-correcting my formulas, but not my spelling and grammar. And find commands take you to the right cells, but you're on your own from there because the words will not be highlighted.
I'm not at all faulting the spreadsheet. It works wonderfully for its intended purpose. As a word processor though, it's a nightmare-and that's because the purpose of a spreadsheet is to crunch numbers. The same goes for PowerPoint, which was designed for building presentations, not paragraphs.
Years ago, wise people at Microsoft built, packaged, and named a series of productivity tools. In my opinion, the names are intuitive and prescriptive. Here are Franny's rules for "the big three."
The word Excel sounds like part of a formula. Formulas crunch numbers. Hence, Excel is for numbers. PowerPoint helps you get to the point with bullet points. And the most obviously named is Word, which is for words, lots and lots of words.
The concept of using a certain app for a certain job seems painfully obvious. But because each of us considers one of these our "go-to app," we sometimes choose the wrong tool for our tasks. If you're building a document, presentation, or worksheet that few but you will use or that requires no revisions, use whichever tool you want. However, if you're building something that many people need to use or that requires iterative group reviews and revisions, please choose your tool wisely. Everyone who has to provide feedback, make revisions, or otherwise process its contents will be eternally grateful.
Or, you could force your entire team to decipher tiny text that stacks up from the bottom and stretches to the right across four screens.
Franny Fried