Recall that Microspeak is not merely for jargon exclusive to Microsoft, but it’s jargon that you need to know to survive at Microsoft.<\/p>\n
For most of my career at Microsoft, the term used by people who want to sound important to say that they want to delve more deeply into a topic was to drill down<\/i>. Here are some citations, suitably anonymized.<\/p>\n Bob added a section on accessibility. We may need to drill down into specifics for each of the requirements.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n We conducted a survey to determine how people use our feature. They broke down into four general categories listed here. Let’s drill down a bit further into each of these categories.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The verb phrase got nouned as drill-down<\/i>, referring to the result of drilling down.<\/p>\n Here is the drill-down.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And it’s also an adjective, meaning “related to the act of drilling down”.<\/p>\n From that number, two drill-down paths exist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The term has even gained official recognition in the Microsoft Writing Style Guide<\/i><\/a>, with its own entry<\/a> with guidance on proper use. Note that it approves the use of the term in the context of data analysis and discourages its metaphorical use.<\/p>\n drill down, drill up, drill through<\/b><\/p>\n It’s OK to use drill down<\/i>, drill up<\/i>, and drill through<\/i> in content about data and the reports generated from them.<\/p>\n Two words as a verb. Hyphenate drill-down<\/i> and drill-up<\/i> as adjectives. Note that drillthrough<\/i> as a noun or an adjective is one word, no hyphen.<\/p>\n Examples<\/b><\/p>\n If you have grouped items in your PivotTable, you can drill down on a group name. Then, you can drill back up to analyze summary data.<\/p>\n Using drill-down and drill-up actions, you can expand and collapse sections within a report to find the data that interests you the most.<\/p>\n If you add the ability to drill through on an existing mining model, the model must be reprocessed before you can drill through to the data.<\/p>\n Use a drillthrough query to retrieve details from the underlying cases or structure data. Drillthrough is useful if you want to see additional details from the case data.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Don’t use to mean following a path (such as folders) or giving something further examination.<\/p>\n Example<\/b><\/p>\n Microsoft MVPs joined an in-depth discussion about Azure security management solutions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n The anti-guidance helpfully gives us a definition of drill down<\/i> as Microspeak: “To give something further examination.”<\/p>\n All of these usages of drill down<\/i> (including the metaphorical ones) are still in wide use, but around the year 2020 or 2021, I encountered a new term that means roughly the same thing, but much more jargony.<\/p>\n I’m referring to double-click<\/i>, which was covered by The Wall Street Journal<\/i><\/a> and amplified by the Language Log<\/a> in 2024.<\/p>\n As far as I can tell, double-click<\/i> means about the same thing as drill down<\/i>, but in a more jargony, cringy way. Finding citations for this use is more difficult because it appears to be primarily used in speech and not writing. I guess everyone is too embarrassed to write it in a document.<\/p>\n There are currently no resources devoted to designing a tutorial. Once we have resources, we can double-click on the journey for how users can find it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Person 1: If the user clicks the button, we will take them to a settings page where they can enable their widgets.<\/p>\n Person 2: I want to double-click on this experience. Why does the user need to explicitly enable their widgets? Is there a path where we can enable them by default?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
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