Re: What Are the Main Problems You Have with MS Word?

["Bill Hall" <bill -dot- hall -at- hotkey -dot- net -dot- au>]

Gary Clark says,

Dick Margulis points out WHY MS-Word is so ubiquitous, but my experience has
been that the reason why so many companies seem to demand its use for
creation of manuals lies in the desire for ease of editing and changing
those documents later, by others who are not tech writers.

My reply is that this "desire" is also the source of untold grief in bid
teams and other MS Word users who have to produce group authored products
against a deadline, to say nothing of the excessive cost of their labour in
correcting Word's formatting hassled and crashes which are almost inevitable
in group authoring environments where the authors are not highly disciplined
tech authors (tech authors even suffer).

With unskilled authors working in a group environment lost productivity may
amount to as much as 50%. Again, as described on the MVP site, the big
problem is that all the formatting instructions are held in invisible tables
in the section breaks and at the end of the file. Cutting and pasting across
different documents or sharing them amongst people who have different things
set up in their styles areas is a recipe for corrupting styles, if not total
disaster.

We've never 36 hour days trying to salvage documents so the tenders could go
out.

XML-based systems offer a far more rational environment for corporate
documentation, and authoring systems that use the standards are almost ready
for prime time. Viva la revolution!

Bill Hall
------------------------------------------
Information is not knowledge
Knowledge is not wisdom
Wisdom is not truth
Truth is not beauty
Beauty is not love
Love is not music
Music is THE BEST
-----------------------------
(Zappa - Packard Goose)


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