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RE: Real World Advantages of Office / Word 2007 and Windows 7
Subject:RE: Real World Advantages of Office / Word 2007 and Windows 7 From:"Combs, Richard" <richard -dot- combs -at- Polycom -dot- com> To:William Sherman <bsherman77 -at- embarqmail -dot- com>, "techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 8 May 2012 07:06:00 -0700
William Sherman made a number of valid points along with some not-so-valid ones. Like this:
> Word is constantly being heralded as publishing and documentation
> software
> but in reality, it is just good secretary software. It does some thing
> great. It flat sucks at a lot. Most know large documents can crash and
> burn
> with regularity. Turn an engineer with limited Word knowledge loose
> with
> changes for your 700 page software administrator manual and it will be
> so
> messed up in formatting, the only way out is to pray you still have an
> old
> copy or convert all to ASCII and reformat from scratch.
I'm a big FrameMaker fanboy and haven't used Word for long documents in years, so springing to its defense doesn't come naturally to me. But as Ben Davies suggested, most of the alleged suckiness of Word is the result of not knowing what you're doing.
And I don't care what authoring tool you're using, it's extremely unwise (to put it politely) to let your SMEs make changes directly in your 700-page manual. Extremely. Unwise.
Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
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rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-903-6372
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