We’ve all seen it, and most of us are guilty of it at some time or another. We are creatures of habit: “I’ve always done it like that” is the familiar cry. For some reason, working with software seems to bring out the worst of this behaviour, and it’s usually a result of a lack of training, or sufficient time to familiarise yourself with possibly more efficient ways of doing things when you have a job to do.

I have for some years been promising myself to learn to touch-type. It would be so much more efficient! But I use a keyboard every day, and the thought of having to first slow down my typing in order to eventually be even quicker has always put me off.

Using Microsoft Word is another example – I can’t count the number of time I have seen users laboriously swipe text and apply bold or a different font for headings, when all they have to do is choose a heading style, such as Heading 1. It’s just down to a lack of awareness. At least with the later versions of Word this has been made easier, with the styles shown graphically on the ribbon toolbar.

And so it is with document software. This week I heard anecdotally about a specialist in a government agency that needed to pull together information provided to him in various formats – Word, Excel and some PDF files. In order to distribute them as a single report, he prints everything, collates and then re-scans using a photocopier that can scan to PDF. Not terribly efficient, and he ends up with 30 pages of scrap paper! He’s now switched to using gDoc Fusion, which happens to be the ideal software tool to do this task entirely electronically, and it will pay for itself in no time with the saving in effort and paper.

This is perhaps an extreme example but we all have our bad habits. We might even know there is a better way, but getting the work done gets in the way of learning how to get the work done quicker! Time to invest in yourself – perhaps some formal training, or sitting down with that colleague who “knows stuff”. Or just spending some time Googling for the answer can be well worthwhile.

Meanwhile, I promise to learn to touch-type. Soon…

OK. This isn’t “Annie Get Your Gun” but it was this song title that came to mind the other day when I reflected back on the subject of Natural User Interfaces (NUI). Having been to a conference recently the buzz word is NUI. Bill Buxton and others refer to it often and I think it’s great because for me it is the only way to make modern day software easier to use.

It’s been touted before of course with different terminology but in the past hardware could not deliver and in most cases still does not deliver all that is needed to get a 100% NUI. Often though it’s also the software that is lacking because the user interfaces are not designed to give the user that natural experience; naturally.

My wife looks after and teaches children of ages ranging between 2 to 12 and is a qualified Montessori teacher. In a nutshell the Montessori method advocates teaching only via concrete objects in a real environment. When I can I observe some of the children as they develop and learn. It’s amazing to see the difference when children are taught with real world physical objects as opposed to abstract concepts, how well they learn and how confident they are to use what they know. The same applies to software users. The more the tool works naturally the easier it is to learn, use and understand how it works. Simple!

In gDoc Fusion that is how we designed the Assembly View. If you need to merge two physical documents into a single document using parts of each, you would unbind them, lay them out on a table page by page and play solitaire with the pages until you organised them as you wanted then stapled the result into a single document.

That is exactly the way the Assembly View works. You can open two or more documents, they display in rows of single pages so you can see their content then you can select one or more pages, drag them and merge into a single document. Simple, intuitive and natural; NUI.

Darren Hartwell from Bracknell is now the proud owner of a brand new Sony Vaio E Series laptop, with a free gDoc Fusion 2.5 license, following our recent Twitter competition. 

10 more lucky tweeters can now also merge multiple format files into one single document, through our easy to use simple drag and drop technology, thanks to their free copies of gDoc Fusion 2.5.

 gDoc Fusion 2.5 allows users to combine, merge and convert to PDF or Word over 200 incompatible document types, including spreadsheets, Word documents, Powerpoint slides, images and PDF files, in to one consolidated document ready for distribution.

Thanks to all of our loyal tweeters for taking part!

Here’s the full list of our lucky tweeters:

Winner:  http://www.twitter.com/BookZone

Runners up:  http://www.twitter.com/abitnerdy
 http://www.twitter.com/Nioniel
 http://www.twitter.com/Westers1401
 http://www.twitter.com/andrew_lillie
 http://www.twitter.com/Kerrianne_xx
 http://www.twitter.com/krains
 http://www.twitter.com/ChristianRocker
 http://www.twitter.com/melanie997
 http://www.twitter.com/medie
 http://www.twitter.com/tarnnie