I updated to Office 2019 during the pandemic but didn’t use Word much during that time. Now I’m setting it up the way I like.
Show Non-Printable Characters
I find it useful to display the whitespace/line breaks etc. This was easy to turn back on.
Word > Preferences > View and then check “All” for “Show Non-Printing Characters”
Adding Styles Quickly
I need to quickly choose styles. In the previous version of Word I had this was a pull down in the top right of the ribbon. In Office 2019, it is Home > Styles Pane. Then my entire right pane is the list of styles. Include the current style as a derived style on top (ex: paragraph + italic)
This pane also has checkboxes for “show style guides” and “show direct formatting guides.” The former puts numbers/colors on the left side that matches the style. The later, highlights text with special styles (like italics).
This approach takes up more real estate than older Word. (where I could just see the text name of the style). I imagine I’ll get used to this quickly and the colors will start to mean something to me. Right now, it feels a bit like a map with the legend “elsewhere”.
Navigation
I chose View > Navigation Pane and chose “Document Map” so I can quickly navigate to different parts of my document.
I haven’t created a new JUnit 5/Gradle project in a IntelliJ in a long time. When doing so today, I ran into a number of problems. I wound up just starting over, but writing up what I encountered/learned.
Java 16 vs 17
IntelliJ supports Java 17. When I set up Gradle, it told me that Gradle doesn’t yet support Java 17. I confirmed on the Gradle website this is true. Ok that’s fair. Java 17 isn’t fully released for another month. While there might be an early adopter package that does work with Java 17, my focus here is JUnit 5, no, Java 17. So I went with Java 16.
String not found – “Package java.lang is declared in module java.base, which is not in the module graph”
This surprised me. I’m not using modules in this project. Or at least I don’t want to be, nor do I have a module-info.java file. I tried invalidating the IntelliJ cache and restarting the IDE. That didn’t work. I then tried deleting the .gradle and .idea directories and reopening IntelliJ. That worked. IntellIJ even asked if I wanted to trust the gradle project as it recreated one.
This approach lost all IntelliJ settings including Java version, gradle version and source/test directories.
Recreating the project
At this point, I decided to delete my build.gradle and settings.gradle files in addition to the .idea and .gradle directories. My plan was to start over. I then created a new Gradle project in the same directory. I created a dummy file and had IntellIJ create a JUnit 5 test for me. That updated the Gradle file in a way that the IDEA was happy with. Now to commit to git lest anything else happen.
I’ve been on a hybrid/distributed team for a long time. Immediately before the pandemic our team worked in the following arrangement (everyone worked 5 days a week regardless of location). Since this team was originally all in NY, I was very conscious of the language I used so NY wasn’t “the center of the universe.”
3 people full time in the NY office
2 people in another office in a different city
1 person in yet a third office in a different city
1 person in the NY office three days a week
1 person in the NY office two days every three weeks
1 person full time in her home office
During the pandemic we all worked from somewhere in our home. Some people had nice home offices. Some people worked from a creative arrangement in the middle of their apartment. I used language about myself like “I’m leaving work now” even though I was moving two feet away.
Right now, the NY office is doing a “back to the office” pilot and my team consists of
me physically in the NY office
one of my teammates physically in the NY office three days a week on a different floor (we weren’t on the same team when the pandemic started so our seats aren’t currently near each other.) It’s a pain to move so waiting until the department shuffles everyone’s seats for that.
everyone else at their home offices (I think everyone except the two of us choosing to be in the pilot has an actual home office)
Last week, I was using a bunch of different conference rooms in the NY office to test the new webcams and such. When I wrote up the experience, I used the phrase “in person.” One of my teammates immediately called me out on that. Which I appreciate. I certainly wasn’t thinking of the NY office as being the center of the universe when it was only myself and one other person from our team there. (at one of the meetings; the others I was the only one in the NY office for.) I was thinking “in-person” with reference to myself.
This got us talking and me thinking about various terms that can be used and various sensitivities that can exist around them. I’m using WFH in the comments column for brevity. If you don’t like that term, substitute another in your head to get to the gist. It’s hard to fully qualify every time. Especially in a discussion about terms and subtleties.
Term
Comments
in-person
Everyone works in person regardless of location.
home
This doesn’t usually bother people. However, it isn’t always home. I worked for a week from a hotel. In some companies, a person could be working at Starbucks. It varies. I do like that this term is part of the WFH abbreviation. One of my remote teammates said she prefers home office or remote over home.
home office
I like this term when talking about people who actually have a home office. However, it is a term that has sensitivities to me because it includes an assumption that one has a space for a home office. (My WFH area is smaller than a cubical and not anywhere near as conducive to work.
onsite
This is a location. If there is only one onsite location and everyone is WFH, it could work. However, in my case, there are three “onsite” locations involved so it doesn’t clarify much.
remote
Depending on the context, this could be a good term. In some ways, it has the same problem as “onsite.” However, it could also mean simply that people aren’t all together if not viewed from the lens of a common location.
distributed
I like this term because it shows that there are varying locations. And it doesn’t make assumptions about a primary site.
teleworking or telecommuting
I like that this is location agnostic. But it also implies that you aren’t at an office. Whereas distributed could mean any location.
virtual
This term assumes that it is replacing an in person thing. It also treats the activity as an alias.If I’m having a meeting, I’m having a meeting. It doesn’t matter if we are in the same room or on Zoom or whatever.
