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

["Nealon, Jessica" <Jessica -dot- Nealon -at- McKesson -dot- com>]

The main problem I have with Word can be summed up in one phrase: "manual
labor." The overall architecture of Word requires a lot of manual (See,
tedious) labor that cuts into time better spent gathering content or (gasp!)
writing.  Two examples:

First:
The net effect of the technical problems with Autonumbering means that,
unless you are have the time, skill, and permission (from tech support) to
write VBA macros, you have to number your steps by hand. To have any control
of it, you need to set a style with a .25 first tab stop and a .25 hanging
indent so that your numbered lists look like numbered lists. Then, you have
to make sure that all your steps in all your tasks are in the appropriate
style, which becomes very interesting when Word reverts to Normal or another
style in your template without notice. In addition, you have to make sure
the numbering is correct every time you make a change to task. Not
surprisingly, the process is extremely error prone. 

Second:
Word is chapter-based, which means (unless you have figured out those
mercurial Section breaks and want to risk a 300-page Word document with
graphics) each chapter has to be PDF'ed separately and the book needs to be
lassoed together in Adobe afterwards. This doubles production time and the
separate chapters make universal updates a nightmare. For example, updating
headers and footers requires you to open every chapter of every book and
change both even and odd headers and footers in each. When the rush is on
and you're understaffed, it's easy to send out a book with incorrect or
inconsistent headers and footers. I know that when I first started, I sent
out a Beta version of a manual with the wrong product name in the even-page
footer of two chapters! I missed it until the final edit.

I could go on, but this is long enough already. Basically, the things that
should be automated (for writing books anyway) aren't and the things that
are automated usually don't work or don't matter; except for Autotext, which
saves my hands everyday!

Regards, 

Jessica Nealon
Technical Writer
Paragon Product Assurance Group - CLT
> McKesson Information Solutions, Inc.
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