As someone who has to use scientific notation to keep count of the number of documents he has been forced to pound into professional format, I can say that MS may as well strip all the style functions out of Word as useless bloat.
The list of users who say some form of “I don’t have time to learn all that style shit” while spending hours every week manually setting and fixing report formats on a line-by-line basis would be almost as long.
I wish whitespace characters weighed something, so I could collect the thousands I strip out of every submitted document and drop them on the heads of those who put them in there. Unfortunately, crushing peoples’ heads would get me arrested.
The size of an RTF and DOCX don’t always follow that pattern. The data files I keep for my customers start at about 80K in an RTF format, are about 50K in DOC and drop to 20K in DOCX. They’re not all that fancy as files go, but we do embed everything in tables to keep the customer information and activity notes organized. The table formatting prevents us from using WordPad on these files and TXT is obviously not an option either.
Reminds of a discussion I had recently with a client who was volunteering his wife to do his bookkeeping. They wanted to use Excel because she was “an expert” with it. She clarified: she knows how to do “everything except formulas.” :smack:
But let’s get back to the OP. Kid*, what sort of job do you hope to get? You have a wonderful group of people with all sorts of work experience, and you came to the right place to get generally honest and helpful advice about getting a job.
Please don’t be offended. I call everybody younger than me “Kid.”
Well, go to craigslist, look up the admin/office listings…
No, never mind, I’ll do it. Here. It’s a big category, lots of ads, lots of very different jobs. Some require a BA.
You can search the category by keyword. I punched in “Word” (as in MS Word), and glanced through the results. Without fail, if the job ad listed Word, it also listed Excel and possibly Outlook and other software packages as well. IMHO, experience/certification in MS Word only will not help you.
There’s lots of different skills requested in these ads, but a big one is multitasking and prioritization. Can you do that? Can you PROVE you can do that?
Another common requirement is a pleasant manner in person and on the phone. Do you have it? Are you sure? This one is difficult to fake.
Think about your career narrative. Why would a company hire you – what do you have to offer, above and beyond what Joe Normal can provide?
As dropzone says, we want to help, and we can be a good resource for you. But the questions you are asking (this certification? when?) are maybe not the right questions.
Feh! All you need is practice. Look at me: a known crank, but also a successful phone worker.
Absolutely vital. I even have an anecdote from the freakin’ Boy Scouts (I’m 60) that I can trot out at a moment’s notice to show how I have ALWAYS been a leader.
There is a big disconnect in many businesses between HR and the managers. The HR people love certifications. They see an applicant with a certification in X and a job that requires knowledge of X. So they bring the person in for an interview. After 3 minutes the manager can tell the person doesn’t know anything useful about X.
So you might get an interview, but actually getting the job itself requires knowing stuff.
As to “X” being Word? I don’t think many HR folk are stupid enough to think that’s worth anything. But, I’ve seen some pretty crappy HR people.
It’s not just HR that loves certifications, it’s a trend among college programs that need to show their graduates, “This is what you’ll leave with besides a diploma.” My community college is trending that way - every program has to have a third-part certification of some sort, some of which is due to Perkins grant requirements (or some other garbage). It doesn’t make a lot of sense in my area (computer science) because there’s really no standard certification out there, but for a Business Technologist degree a MS certification may make sense.
I teach some of the MS Office classes, and you’d better know more than just Word. Get some experience with Excel and PowerPoint (not Access) to be useful in an office environment.
I agree with others above - you had better know what sections, styles, headers, and templates are in Word and be willing to demonstrate those skills in an interview test. I only teach the introductory Word course, but even that intro course covers those things.
just kidding