I, as no special exception to the average American, use my PC on a daily basis for work, shopping, bill paying, reading, learning, socializing, and looking at pictures of cats while watching videos of people being hit in the groin in various Rube Goldberg-esque scenarios. Though I love my Apple devices (especially my iPhone), I am a PC at heart, even when it comes to artistic applications. And, like many people, when it comes to work I tend to exclusively use Microsoft software. During my time using these applications I have more than once wished I could use some of their features in real life (regardless of how impossibly improbable that would be). Here are 3 of my favorites:
Format Painter
Format Painter is in most of the Microsoft business suite applications and it is pretty awesome. Simply highlight an object or piece of text, click “Format Painter” and then click a different object or highlight a different piece of text and all the formatting from the original object/text (font, color, size, effects, etc.) will be transposed onto the 2nd object/text. This is a great time saving shortcut and is inexplicably fun to use.
In real life: You could apply the fit and comfort of your favorite pair of jeans to those weird mom jeans you bought because they were on sale and didn’t make your butt look big. You could format paint that one time you had a good hair day and apply it to every other day of your life. Got a bald spot? Not anymore. As long as you had one ripe tomato all your tomatoes would be ripe. Don’t like the new gas prices? No problem. Buy 1 new rim for your car, now you got 4. I could go on…
Distribute Horizontally
This is an arrange feature I use primarily in PowerPoint. It allows you to select several objects on the screen and automatically distance them evenly apart based on the outer two objects. Simply select three or more objects, open the “Align” menu and then click “Distribute Horizontally” and the objects are now equidistant apart.
In real life: I would largely use this to make it so that the cars in front of my apartment weren’t wasting valuable parking spaces by leaving themselves a 5 foot buffer between cars on either side, which is one of my biggest non-important pet-peeves (besides people using the word “pet-peeve”).
Drop Shadow
This is an affect you can add to objects in programs like Word and PowerPoint to make them pop off the page. Have a boring square? Make it a cool square by dropping a shadow on that fool.
In real life: Admittedly, this is a bit of stretch, but if in real life I was able to create a shadow it would imply that I was creating a light source that in turn created the shadow, so in essence I would be creating light at will, when and where I wanted it and to what degree. This would save me a small fortune on light-bulbs over my lifetime…
So, what Microsoft application tools do you wish worked in real life?
