RE: Re Word/Weird

[HALL Bill <bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com>]

Most of us live in a world where we must use Word, so this is not intended
as another volley in the application war.

Someone sent me a personal wail because his management is about to move his
documentation effort (thousands of pages) from FrameMaker to Word. I thought
the following advice to him might be more generally useful. 

Try collecting some of the recent Techwhirl wails and dropping these on your
manager's desk, so your company knows what it is doing to you. 

However, if you are going to be stuck with Word, convince your management:

(1) If you are running a large corporate network, use NT rather than Windows
OS. Personally I suffered several crashes a week running Word on Windows
(3.1). I have heard from others that the newer versions of Windows aren't
much better where crashes are concerned. However, since we switched over to
NT - even when we were still running Word 6 - I managed to run for a month
or more without crashing.

(2) Save any graphics kept within your documents as Word Pictures (import,
cut, paste-special). Some conversions require you to perform the cut/paste
special operation twice to get the graphic into Picture format. The downsize
is that the pictures aren't editable (keep the original elsewhere for this
purpose), but the advantage is a greatly reduced file size and graphics
related problems (at least in my own relatively straight-forward documents
using clip-art and PowerPoint graphics).

(3) Establish a centrally located template developer with VBA skills who
truly understands how to build macro supported Word templates (several
techwr-l posters have offered good advice in this area). You might also use
Word's customisation functions to disable all of the style modification
functions. (I tried this for one tender project - it takes a considerable
research effort to find all of the different paths that can be followed to
change a style and I didn't have enough lead time or power to make it
effective.)

(4) Centrally manage all your templates as controlled (read-only) documents.
If a template works, whatever you do - don't tinker with it. 

(5) Equip someone with a baseball bat and instruct them to knock any
author's block off who doesn't use the template provided for a particular
type of document or who alters the template's defaults in any way.

(6) Fire any staff who consistently won't follow the discipline.

Unfortunately, the company I work for is too large and politically diverse
to manage the inherently anarchical Word environment centrally (I have
tried!). Outside of our ILS area, all authoring is done by subject matter
experts rather than trained tech writers (for good economic reasons). Even
within ILS we have more SMEs than tech writers. In our environment, too many
people consider themselves to be Word 'power' users and have proven to be
politically impossible to discipline and control at the 'productivity'
level. As noted in my earlier postings to techwr-l, in my company it is
proving easier to shift the authoring paradigm for critical corporate
documents from 'word processing' to 'knowledge engineering and management'.
However, the paradigm shift is not trivial and involves major application
and training costs, but management finally appears to have accepted the
business case that it will be cost-effective to do so.

The bottom line is that if you are stuck with Word as your principal
authoring application, help your management recognise that the whole
Microsoft paradigm of feature bloat - trying to be all things for all people
- encourages user anarchy. My company is a good example of what happens if
you can't control that anarchy. By contrast, the Australian Defence
Publishing Service (DPS) has proven that Word can be used effectively by
even larger organisations than ours if it is provided with smart templates
and these are used with discipline. Their DocGen templates work most of the
time for most service writing requirements and are used throughout the
Australian Defence Forces with minimal problems. There is a substantial cost
to hire and maintain this kind of central expertise (it takes more clout
than I have), but this is also a cost effect way to improve the productivity
of your writers. As noted in a my second posting yesterday, the Tasmanian
Legislature and Standards Australia have also implemented quite effective
Word-based authoring environments.

The crux is DISCIPLINE. Word absolutely isn't what it should be, but it
isn't too bad if you are prepared to wear the costs to use it in a tightly
disciplined way. If you can't enforce the discipline at the authoring level,
Word can cause disasters, and you are better off using an inherently
disciplined structured authoring tool such as FM+SGML and wear the
application and training costs to deploy it. Your company will save money in
the long run.

Bill Hall
Documentation Systems Specialist
Integrated Logistic Support
Naval Projects and Support
Tenix Defence Systems Pty Ltd
Williamstown, Vic. 3016 AUSTRALIA
Email: bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com <mailto:bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com>