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So you want something to stir-up some dirt --- here's one:
We work for the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and in one week - we
will be rolling out 14 new templates which we will "force" the company to
use so that the customer facing documents all have the same feel and
appearance. Be it as it may - our templates were built in MS Word because
that's what we have. We are led to believe that we protected the
documents/styles appropriately and have separately stored the templates
from the source documents. Beings we are a company heavy on engineers and
extremely light on tech writers(oddly enough) - we designed a presentation
that puts all the nuts and bolts together for using Word, its' styles and
good practices to follow. Now here's the part to churn the dirt:
1. If you were us - what kinds of things would you have done to
protect/setup/build your templates? What Word features would you have
instilled? What Word features would you have avoided? How much of the
templates would you populate with information? How much/what parts of the
template would you Group so that the text can't be changes? Would you have
an abundance of Document Properties or a minimum? .....
2. If you were us - what information types would you present to the
engineers (who you can assume are at a novice level of Word usage) so that
they can effectively draft the documents that are needed for their project?
(*Our engineers have to be the drafters because of the heavy technical
content - eliminating them from the value stream is not an option.) What
types of things have you noticed from your engineers/coworkers as Word
features that are hard to grasp - how would you break it down? What are the
"must knows" about template usage that the engineers/creators should be
aware of? ...... How technical would you be if presenting this information
to the entire company (+\- 250 people)?
I will note - half of these templates are about product development
(pre-design, design, test, verification and report of findings), the other
half is for production and post-production needs (assembly, install,
modifications etc). Hopefully that provides a narrower scope.
The sky is the limit - I want to know any / everything that you would
do.... Please :)
*~ And the Green Flag Drops ~*
H.M. Fritz
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Doc-To-Help: new website, content widgets, and an output that works on any screen.
