The Butt Ugly Weblog

Janne's theory of MS Office progression

You see, I have this theory. It's my theory, and it is as follows.

A-hem.

Your progression in a large IT corporation can be largely measured by the Microsoft Office programs you use. When you start at a new workplace, your most important tool is likely to be Outlook. You do whatever you were hired to do, and you send a lot of email.

Once you get a bit more responsibility, you get to use Word - that is, you will write pre-studies, documentation, analysises (analysii?) and all that sort of stuff. You use templates and embed pictures and write lots of stuff nobody is probably ever going to read (unless you are a technical writer, in which case everyone is a critic.)

Then you get tagged by someone, and suddenly you find yourself working on a Powerpoint slideset "for tomorrow". Pretty soon, this becomes your most important tool, as you will need to start presenting your work to other people in bullet-point -sized bites. Powerpoint will teach you to abstract and "top-levelize" things until they become meaningless. If you are unlucky, it also becomes your main documentation tool. But sooner or later you realize that you are in a group that only understands Powerpoint as a communication method.

The pinnacle of the corporate evolution is Excel. Once Excel becomes your main tool, you are responsible for money, personnel, and allocation thereof. Therefore you have power. Or at least the appearance of power - you may still have to make a Powerpoint to make the persons with Real Ultimate Power to agree with your Excel.

Finally, the circle is closed when all the Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint decks are delegated to someone else, and you find yourself alone in your office, accompanied only by Outlook again. And then, my son, you have mastered the True Way of the Office, and you can use the same Outlook you started with, for all your business needs.