RE: Fun with Word

["McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

Ken Poshedly recounted: 
> As for Word, yes, I now use only preset paragraph tags called
"bulletted"
> and "number", and yes, it HAS happened that mid-way or even later in
the
> document, I'll highlight a block of text for retagging to bulleted for
> example and watch as miraculously, the tag name is applied (as shown
in
> the "Style" field in the menu bar at the top of the screen) while
every
> bulleted item in the doc reverts to bulletless text with body text
> attributes.
> 
> Please don't tell me I must have done something wrong, because I know
from
> this list what NOT to do and what TO do and this is EXACTLY as it
happens.
> 
> Not every time, but sometimes.
> 
> Windows XP, Word 2003, on a PC with oodles of RAM and speed.

Strangely, before starting to use Word in semi-earnest - when we bought
a company that had dozens of long documents already committed in Word -
I failed to go back and read all 4 million posts on Techwr-l, WordPC,
and a couple of other lists, to find, collate, and assimilate all the
things that I _should_ do, and all the things that I _should avoid_
doing with Word.
Instead, with a deadline a week away, I jumped in and started making
updates, and started trying to figure out why - in addition to several
dozen ordinary-looking styles, there were nearly 250 styles named with a
couple of letters followed by (almost-)sequential numbers (CSM_1,
CSM_10, CSM_2, CSM_20) and why those strange styles seemed to be
scattered randomly throughout the document(s) and why they sometimes
seemed to be having some effect, and other times... not. 
So, it's no wonder that I've experienced _exactly_ what Ken describes. 
Moreover, I've had things like that occur and not noticed them. Do y'all
actually notice, the next time you pass through page 483 on the way to
page 491 that some of the body-text-looking text on 483 is actually
supposed to be "bulleted" text?? That is, I failed to notice until I'd
made other changes, and/or saved the document (thereby embedding the
unnoticed error into the very fabric of the universe).  It didn't take
me long to learn (a subset of) how very many things there are that
Maggying won't fix.

All because I was too lacking in confidence to tell the managers to put
the release on hold so I could take a couple of weeks to learn all
possible foibles of Word that might possibly have been committed, how to
recognize them (possibly in advance of their happening), and how to both
deal with them if committed, and prevent them if not.

My last Word book is from the 1990s. I should probably get something
newer.

I looked into what the local community college is offering at night, and
it amounts to either rank-beginner stuff or advanced courses that
require the several rank-beginner courses (I've never, for instance,
needed or wanted to perform a mail-merge or print envelopes or.....).

Oh drat. That was a rant, wasn't it.

Time to switch my "AComplaintFreeWorld.org" bracelet from my right wrist
back to my left wrist.

Cheers,

Kevin
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