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Subject:MS Word screws up yet ANOTHER project From:poshedly -at- bellsouth -dot- net To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Fri, 07 Dec 2007 14:51:03 +0000
Nothing you guys haven't heard about before now. And nothing anyone here can do. I'm just venting.
(As John Lennon once sang it, "And nothing to get hung about!" BTW, his sad day is tomorrow, Dec. 8.)
But yet once again, as of a few minutes ago (and it's now about 9:50 a.m. Eastern Standard Time in the U.S. as I complete this message), MS Word, the program that won't be fixed and won't go away, just undid weeks of work in an instant -- without me even touching a key. It simply changed the font and spacing in all of the dozens of tables in the 164-page manual I'm currently working on.
Yep, whereas eveything in all of the tables was set to Arial 10 pt with preset spacings in place, in the blink of an eye -- and with no action by me -- I saw it magically change to Times Roman and goofed-up spacings.
Yes, the "S"-word is applicable here!
This happened a week ago as well in yet another of the books I'm completing (that one is around 230 pages). And it took days to go back and redo those tables.
Yes, I checked the attributes and anything else that I thought that could explain this, but it simply wasn't something that anybody here or who I know outside the company could explain, except that I was told the time-worn phrase, "Yes, Word sometimes does that."
My contract is about up and I've approached management about new projects; in the meantime, they've finally ordered FrameMaker 8.0 (I've used Frame for about 9 years, and have even smoothly completed 900-page manuals with it). There's no telling if I'll be here when FrameMaker arrives, but it would be nice.
And yes, it's an engineering firm which has never had a tech writer on staff before. So they find it no big deal since none ofthem have had this happen to THEM. All the docs here were either done by the engineers in Word or else they use vendor docs (which REALLY suck!). (My company is really A1 and designs and builds cement manufacturing facilities -- mess up with this stuff and you become part of your surroundings.)
-- Kenpo in Atlanta
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