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I have a nasty problem with MS Word...one I haven't
encountered before. I'm not sure if I'm writing a
"Beware" or "Help Me" message, so if you can help,
please do, but if you can't, don't do what I did.
I've created, from scratch via ASCII text and a brand
new template, a 230+ page software manual that
includes text (about 28,000 words) and screenshots
(about 100, which are copied into the document). The
manual includes a Table of Contents, Index, List of
Figures, and List of Tables (all of which are
auto-generated), and also has footers that use
autotext from the chapter titles, and headings
following the X.X.X hierarchy to three levels. (I'm
including all these details to give you a grasp of the
complexities I have built into the file and template.)
Everying comes from the template and there are NO
format overrides (except for the ocassional bold or
italic word). I have always hated Word as a desktop
publishing platform, but I had no choice in my current
assignment to switch to my preferred platforms,
FrameMaker or even Quicksilver (Interleaf). Despite my
general animosity towards Word, the manual has behaved
marvelously throughout the project...until now.
After I distributed the 3rd review draft, I decided to
try out the Word Revision Tracking feature to collect
the input of the 8-10 reviewers for the final draft,
which should have needed only minor changes.
The Word file size before I converted it to PDF for
the third draft was about 2 MB. When I began revising
for the final draft, I turned on the revision tracking
feature and did a "Save As..." to begin my work (I do
up to 5 "Save As..." per day to keep the word file
gremlins at bay, which means I have hundreds of
incremental backups with names like "###rev2-1c", etc.
After having revised only about 10 percent of the
manual, I now have 6 backup files whose sizes are 4.7
MB, 6.5 MB, 11 MB, 12 MB, 16 MB, 24 MB. I sent out the
6th (24MB) file to a local drive for the reviewers to
revise. The first reviewer made a few changes and
e-mailed the file back to me...it is 152 MB and I
can't even open it! I went back to the 24 MB file and
tried to save it down to Word 6.0 and it became 80 MB.
Next I took the 24 MB file, accepted all the changes
and turned off the revision tracking, and saved, and
it became a 28 MB file....(keep in mind, that the
amount of data in the file before I started this whole
revision tracking bomb was only 2 MB).
Now it seems my only option is to go back to the 2 MB
file and redo the revisions (which wouldn't take long
at all). The problem is, I kinda liked the idea of the
revision tracking capability because it seems like it
would work really well with a lot of reviewers.
Anybody have any thoughts, suggestions, similar
experiences? Please don't recommend that I switch
platforms to something long-book friendly, because I
already tried that, and it's too late anyway. I also
recognize that I could send out PDF files to everyone
and have them make comments that way, but not all of
them have full Acrobat, and it isn't as elegant a
solution as the Word revision tracking promised to be.
Regards,
Tom
=====
Tom Hauwiller
tomhauwiller -at- mediaone -dot- net
If you've got one arm, one ear, and most of your attention
dedicated to your telephone, who is driving your car?
Please...hang up and drive!
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