Do you need the new version of Microsoft Office? After reading about today’s Office 2010 launch, I doubt I will upgrade. But I may need Word 2010.

Office 2010’s new feature list fails to interest me. It’s a long list of things I don’t need.

For example, I don’t need the SharePoint integration. I can’t use SQL or the Office Communications Server.

I’ve stopped using Outlook. So anything new there passes me by. Outlook doesn’t make sense for a single user when Gmail is so much easier.

I’d rather slash my wrists than inflict PowerPoint on anyone.

Much as I admire Excel, I barely use it. The Office 2007 version is more than enough. If I’m stuck, Google Spreadsheets can ride to my rescue.

Word 2010

Word is different. I use Word 2007 daily. I’m a journalist. My word processing needs are basic.

I don’t use mail merge or do anything fancy involving macros. I’ve never used cross-references, indexing, or end-notes.

For me, Word is a sledgehammer cracking a nut.

I certainly don’t need any more Word features. In fact, I’d prefer fewer.

For all its allegedly user friendly face, Word is a complex mishmash of fancy new gadgets and clunky old bits which still don’t work as expected and barely work with each other.

The extra graphic handling features in Word 2010 mean nothing to me. Word’s fussy auto-formatting makes my blood boil. The safety features are also annoying.

If I need to collaborate on documents – which happens in at least two of my regular freelance jobs – I use Google Docs. It’s a lousy word-processor, but a great way to share.

Despite all this, I still may shell out for Word, simply because it is a tool of my trade. I’m comfortable working in Word. Moving to an alternative would be a small financial investment, but a huge investment in terms of training.

I’ve found over the years it pays to stay up-to-date with Word because sooner or later I run in to compatibility problems.

Which sums things up. I don’t need Office 2010. I may need Word 2010, but not yet.

No upgrade discount

All of which makes Microsoft's decision to charge everyone full price for the software look like a dumb move. Lord knows there's little enough incentive to upgrade, but to make users pay a premium rather than offer discounted upgrade prices will make the buying decision far easier for many users.

An annoying aspect of moving home was the sheer volume of paper we moved between houses. Despite living in a digital age, paper was a third of the total weight moved.

We'll put books and magazines – probably the largest part – to one side and concentrate on other paper. It's time to become a paperless journalist.

Home business is paper-centric

I run a home business and my wife also has a business. We have plenty of paper. Our three two-drawer filing cabinets are full of business documents. We store at least the same amount in boxes.

We're journalists, so we keep archive copies of newspapers, magazines etc we have written for in the past – about two filing cabinets. Reference material fills another cabinet.

There's another cabinet of non-work related paper. Add in our children's old schoolbooks and their paper junk.

All-in-all our paper collection would fill a room. Around 6 full-sized filing cabinets.

Admittedly we're at the high-end of the scale, but our paper hoard is not abnormal.

Clearly I need to get rid of as much paper as possible. Ideally we'd have no paper, we'd be paperless. But that's unrealistic.

I'm aiming to cut the paper mountain to just two two-drawer filing cabinets and my scanner is my friend.

Before starting, it's worth remembering paper is:

• Awkward to move
• Heavy
• Bulky
• Relatively fragile
• Many documents are badly faded or torn
• Combustible
• Prone to mould (and therefore unhealthy)
• Difficult to search.

Move to paperless started years before

We knew the move was coming, so I started scanning documents well in advance. Six months later I estimate I turned around 10 percent of the total paper pile into digital documents. At this rate it could take four years to reach my paperless target.

Most people associate workplace bullying with blue-collar workers. But bullying is also common in knowledge-based industries.

Surveys show workplace bullying takes place in just about every industry, though the specific form of bullying changes from industry to industry.

To underline the problem in white-collar workplaces a 2002 report by Australia’s APESMA professional women's network said around one-third of respondents to its survey have been bullied at work.

In 2000, Australia's Office of the Employee Ombudsman says it is currently receiving more than 500 complaints a year on workplace bullying related issues and that number is increasing each year.

Workplace bullying increasing

In its January 1999 Australian Jobs Index Survey, Morgan and Banks reported that 10.4% of employers believe bullying is increasing at work. (I'd like to quote more up-to-date statistics from Australia and New Zealand on this but can't find any).

According to England's The Daily Telegraph, an online poll of 10,000 people found that 92 per cent believe they are the victims of workplace taunts and intimidation, with 56 per cent believing it is a serious problem in their office, shop or factory.

International research and anecdotal evidence from Australia and New Zealand suggests that the worst industries for bullying are education, healthcare, social services and the voluntary sector. The Morgan and Banks 1999 Jobs Index survey identified tourism as a particular problem industry.

There’s also evidence bullying is more widespread in the public sector than in private industry, though this may simply show the willingness of public sector workers to report bullying.

Until recently there wasn’t much formal awareness of bullying as a problem. To some extent the increasing number of reported cases reflects the fact that employees are only just becoming used to being able to report bullying.

Outsourcing and cost-cutting can trigger bullying

But there are other disturbing trends. Some white-collar staff unions have pointed out that outsourced operations and understaffed workplaces are ideal breeding grounds for middle management bullies.

There’s evidence managers, who are themselves under undue pressure, often turn into workplace bullies as a misguided coping strategy.

Bullying can take a number of forms. At one end of the spectrum are malicious rumours, over critical work evaluation and physical or verbal isolation. At the more extreme end there are direct verbal threats and even physical violence.

Deaths as a result of workplace bullying are thankfully rare, but they do happen.

Of course, bullying has been a feature of the workplace for most of human history. No doubt when the senior public works managers of Ancient Egypt floated down the Nile on their annual off-site management brainstorming session some bright spark figured that a light whipping might incentivise the pyramid-building process and spice up productivity.

Bullying kills productivity

Today’s more enlightened managers, particularly in knowledge-based industries, recognise a happy workforce is a productive workforce and that bullying has a direct negative impact on productivity.

There are all kinds of estimates put on the potential costs of workplace bullying, but ultimately it is impossible to measure the economic cost.

Other facts about workplace bullying.

• Most research says that men and women are bullied in roughly equal numbers and both men and women bully others in roughly equal numbers. However women are more likely to report a bullying incident – men are less willing to admit to being intimidated.
• Same sex bullying is far more common that intra-sex bullying.
• Victims often lose self-esteem and blame themselves for the problem.
• About one victim in 100 either attempts or succeeds to commit suicide.
• 90% of calls to Britain’s workplace bullying hotline came from white-collar workers – only 5% involved manual workers.
• About 10% of all reported cases result in legal action – this proportion is increasing.
• Two-thirds of the members of Unison (the UK civil service union) say they have witnessed workplace bullying.
• Most bullied people report damage to their health
• The overwhelming majority of bullies are repeat offenders.
• In the majority of cases more senior managers say they are aware that the bullying took place.
• Bullying is responsible for around one resignation in four.

If you have been bullied at work, why not use our anonymous comment feature at the Knowledge Worker website to share your experience?

See also:
Workplace bullying resources

I wrote this piece in 1987 when I was editing The Dominion's computer pages. The Dominion is a daily  newspaper in Wellington, New Zealand (it's now known as the Dominion-Post).

The story is dated, but the message rings true even today.

One of the greatest myths of the computer era is the so-called paperless office. A few years ago, the phrase was all the rage, but you hardly hear of it these days. The reality is that despite years of office automation, human beings still have a love affair with the printed word. That is a word printed on paper in ink.

In fact the only effect office automation has had on the amount of paper in the average office is to increase it substantially. Word-processors and desk-top publishing systems are specifically designed for the task of pushing out ever increasing piles of the stuff. And they are efficient at it.

If the conservationists were serious about reducing the threat to the Amazonian rain forests they should get to the heart of the matter and attack desk-top publishing.

Every time a computer user sends a document to a dot-matrix printer, there is a nasty rasping sound as the printer pins push ink off a ribbon onto another sheet of paper. A hundred thousand sheets of paper make a tree and before long the lumberjack's saw makes another nasty rasping sound as it chops down yet another tree. A million trees or so make a forest and if we loose too many of those we'll soon be making a nasty gasping sound as our atmosphere goes down the gurgler.

Of course this is overdramatic, but it is worth remembering that computers don't do away with paper, they merely increase the rate at which it can be pumped out.

A further problem is that the sheer weight of paper churned out by a worker is taken by management to be a measure of that worker's productivity.

Paperless failure

This talk of the failure of the paperless office concept is reminiscent of the work of that great scholar C. Northcote Parkinson, the author of Parkinson's Law.  He wrote simple wisdom is simple English. One day he will recognised as the great philosopher of the twentieth century. For the most part, his contribution to the computer industry is still to be felt.

Parkinson's law states, "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

I can add to this Bennett's law, "computer generated paperwork expands so as to fill the in-trays, out-trays, filing cabinets, brief cases and waste paper baskets available for its storage".

Electronic mail doesn't help either. I can write about this from bitter experience as an ex-IBM Profs user. Profs is an office automation tool, which employees mainly use to keep their diaries and send electronic mail notes to one another all around the globe. Profs is good at doing what it sets out to do. But it does little to bring about the paperless office.

My terminal would regularly bleep, a message would appear at the bottom of the screen saying "read your mail". A few key depressions later I would be informed that a blue Ford Cortina in number two car park has its lights on, or this week's weasel fancier's meeting would be held in the staff dining room on Tuesday. Gripping stuff maybe, but it certainly never improved my productivity to be interrupted by such vital messages.

It is unfair to single out Profs for criticism, however I do so because it is the only office automation system that I have personally been acquainted with. It is reasonable to assume that other manufacturer's products cause similar reactions in their users. In fact, it isn't the technology that is at fault as much as the way that it is used.

It may have changed since my day, but I can remember being taught how to use system. There were about five people in the class. We were instructed by a data-processing department guru turned tutor who recommended that we kept a list of all our Profs document numbers handwritten in a notebook. Incidentally, these notebooks were available in the stationary stores, but you had to send a Profs note to order one. What's more, he also told us to get and keep a hard copy of any important messages that we received through the system.

As someone who, after years of exposure to all types of computing, was more than merely computer literate, I was shocked. I questioned the tutor, "are you saying that to keep a record of document numbers we have to write them down on paper?"

"Well," he answered clearly embarrassed, "it is easier that way."

"Easier than what?", I replied curiously.

"It's too difficult to explain here", was his cryptic answer.

I could see that this was an unprofitable line of enquiry so I changed tack, "Ok then, why do we need to keep hard copies of our messages when the system is supposed to archive them?"

"Because they might get lost", the tutor mumbled this as though he was frightened of anyone overhearing.

Somebody else asked the tutor the obvious question, "if they might get lost, what is the point of the system".

The poor tutor reddened and tactfully changed the subject; "stop asking dumb questions." The only thing was, they weren't dumb questions, they were relevant questions, the sort of questions that anyone who needs to work with computers should feel free to ask an employer.

The tutor should have been pleased that employees were concerned about their productivity. In fact, he just wanted us to conform to a imposed work-pattern. As it happened things did get lost by the system, but only when the high-priests of the data-processing department were tinkering with the system.

Churning out paper

This might have been an acceptable state of affairs in the days of steam computing when men in white coats scuttled around cathedral-like installations replacing vacuum tubes, but my friends in other workplaces had Apple Macintoshes on their desks and were churning out laser printed piles of paper which were neater than our system could manage. This not only made my friends look more productive than me, but their refined print styles and fancy founts made them look more creative too.

Expensive IBM 3370 terminals graced our desks. The terminals were connected to a powerful 370 mainframe system with banks of mass storage devices. The whole caboodle cost millions, and contained enough computing power to put a man on the moon, but we still had to resort to notebooks, pens and ream after ream of paper printout if we wanted to use the blasted thing.

To cap it all, we had to employ extra internal mail clerks to deliver all the computer generated paper that we were now efficiently churning out. The office automation system was originally installed to save money by replacing the internal mail system. But to save more money we had a central printer station, and the printed documents were delivered to people's desks via the internal mail system which in theory was now redundant. Mr Parkinson would have understood.

I complained to my boss, "It is a bit like using a stone-age axe to repair an internal combustion engine."

He replied, "send me a Profs note about it".

I cried.