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LeAnne
No, I missed your previous post because we've just had a system migration here. We are all set now.
I'll forever be in your debt if this can help me make my users happy. I'll look forward to getting the template.
I have been designing customized templates for the different user groups--it is a painstaking experience.
Please add my name to your distribution list so I can keep you posted about my progress.
Thank you so much.
Margaret Muwonge
IT Services Division
Veridian
-----Original Message-----
From: LeAnne -dot- Baird -at- acs-inc -dot- com
Sent: Friday, January 17, 2003 12:14 PM
To: Muwonge, Margaret
Subject: templates and DocToHelp
Margaret,
I don't know if you saw my post on this before. I'm taking the opposite
approach to rework, creating a Word 2000 template with custom toolbars for
all the styles my document authors need and turning off their standard and
formatting toolbars to keep them from overriding things. This template
should be done very soon, in the next couple weeks, if you'd like to share
it. My users have embraced this concept , reviewing early prototypes and
expressing their enthusiasm.
The template contains 115 of my "standard" character and para information
mapping styles (which should be everything but the literary editing styles),
is XML-ready, and uses macros that make many of the common user-difficult
tasks easy. For instance, its table creation buttons insert one of two
pre-formatted tables, and it uses insert and update sequence-numbering
fields instead of Word's unreliable autonumbering functions in its step and
numbered paragraph styles.
To use it most effectively, park it on the network and it automatically
attaches itself to every new document created with the special menu command
(New Yourcompany document). Most users are not sophisticated enough to know
how to get out of it after that. :-)
In the fullness of time the template will have a WWP counterpart to
automatically generated HTML topic files and a FrameMaker counterpart for
seamlessly importing the Word files to create Framemaker Books. (FM having
the only decent book-handling and indexing functions of all the authoring
tools.)
If you want to be on the distribution list for this template and its
subsequent updates, please let me know--I'm assembling a distribution list.
You are welcome to use all or part of it and modify it as you will to fit
your particular design requirements--I am developing it as a public domain
tool.
Happy to help as I can,
=LeAnne
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