Re: Word up

["Tim Altom" <taltom -at- simplywritten -dot- com>]

Andrew said:

> Sure, some tools have more bells and whistles. And some tools can do
things
> easier than others.  That's just mechanics. I think you, and others, are
> confusing the notion of expertise and product loyalty with real value.  If
you
> are an expert in X tool, then obviously you are going to feel that tool is
more
> valuable. But that does not mean that tool is more valuable for everybody
and
> every company.

To which I reply:

It's not just a matter of mechanics. There really is a parallel between the
worker and his tools. When I was a service engineer, I picked my own tools
to carry because no manager knew enough to pick them for me. Doing so would
have only hampered my effectiveness and my efficiency.

Today managers pick Word for many of us to use, but without any appreciation
of its nature. Raw Word is what most people use, of course, but to gain the
speed and efficiency I need, I often modify templates, write macros, add
controls, until the average Word user couldn't use my Word templates anyway.
The problem is that Word breaks. It crashes. I was at a client site just a
month ago working in Word (under some protest) when some of the Word files
abruptly became corrupted. Nothing else was affected on the network, only
.doc files. Whoops. Time to ask the network administrators of a Fortune 500
company, who have nothing whatever to do with their time, to rummage into
the backups and restore my files. The problem here was that native .doc
files are fragile as crystal.

I've had Word lock up my entire system dozens of times in a day, because of
corrupted headers or footers. Master document is a joke and nobody with any
experience will try to use it. Numbering is sloppy and hard to manage,
especially if you insert unnumbered paras between the numbered ones. Word
loses its mind and renumbers spontaneously. I had this happen in another
project that insisted on Word and was filled with procedures. I spent at
least fifty percent of my review time wrestling with numbered lists that
continually assigned numbers to paras that didn't need them and hadn't had
them the last time the file was closed.

In short, Word is inefficient to use. We know from long experience to pad a
proposal with at least 20% more time if we have to use Word, just for the
inevitable long and frustrating problem-solving we'll have to do.

The dispute over Word is not just about tool loyalty, but about suitability.
I've used God knows how many editors in my time: Galaxy, Ready-Set-Go,
WP5.1, Word for DOS, vi, XEmacs, Ami Pro, PageMaker, FrameMaker, edlin, and
every version of Word for Windows ever shipped. Each has its place, I think,
or at least HAD its place. But pushing a professional to use Word for
technical communication is as lunatic as making Tolstoy use clay tablets for
"War and Peace". I'm sorry, but this isn't about tool loyalty; it's about
whether the tool is efficient enough. My 20 years of experience and hundreds
of documents of all types tells me that Word is deficient on that score.
Ironically, a company that hopes to avoid waste by imposing a "common" tool
will actually bleed red from the inefficiencies over time, and all too often
they don't track, so they don't know. It's like somebody pointed out to me
one time about sealing cracks around windows and doors; it's cumulative, and
a bunch of small cracks adds up to the equivalent of a gap the size of an
open barn door. It may seem like sound business to demand the use of a
common though inefficient tool, but it doesn't factor in the frequent
"damn-it's" emanating from cubicles throughout the tech doc department as
writers have to backtrack and rebuild.


Tim Altom
Simply Written, Inc.
Featuring FrameMaker and the Clustar(TM) System
"Better communication is a service to mankind."
317.562.9298
Check our Web site for the upcoming Clustar class info
http://www.simplywritten.com



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