My grandfather was a carpenter. I don’t remember how old I was — young enough that everything in his shop seemed a little bit magic — but I remember asking him why he had four hammers.
He looked at me like the answer was obvious.
“I don’t have four hammers,” he said. “I have four tools. Each one’s designed to do something different.”
I didn’t think much of it at the time. It was just something Grandpa said in his shop, one of a hundred things a boy hears and half-forgets.
But it came back around. When I got out of the Army, he started asking me a different question, over and over, for years: “How big is your toolbox? Do you have all the tools you need to be successful?”
I think about that a lot when I’m teaching. Excel, Power BI, SharePoint, Copilot — none of them are “better” than the others, any more than a claw hammer is better than a tack hammer. They’re each built for a different job. Use the right one, and the work goes easy. Use the wrong one, and the same job gets hard, frustrating, sometimes impossible — not because you’re bad at it, but because you picked up a tool that was never meant to do what you’re asking it to do.
That’s really what every class comes down to for me: helping people build a bigger toolbox. Not overwhelming them with everything at once, just handing them one more tool, one at a time, until they’ve got what they need for the job in front of them.
So if you ever catch yourself wondering why there are so many different apps, features, or ways to do the same task in Microsoft 365 — that’s not clutter. That’s your toolbox.
I didn’t understand any of that as a kid standing in Grandpa’s shop. It took getting older — and getting asked that same question enough times — to realize he wasn’t really talking about hammers. He was asking if I was paying attention to what I had, and what I still needed.
I ask myself that same question now. And it’s the same question I hope my students start asking themselves too.