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Last week David Mitchell replied to the poor soul who had to convert all the
company's WP documents to Word. His response was right on.
We also went from WP to Word, but we didn't have to convert all old
documents, only the ones that needed to be updated. The conversion was
pretty easy. I, too am a huge Word fan (I can't understand why people stay
with WP, except that they've already made that non-intuitive learning curve
& don't want to abandon the accomplishment). Like David said, after
converting, you only have to do a few pages of manual formatting, and rest
is macro time. Macros for this kind of work are wonderfully easy - you
don't need to know how to program them (yet - once you find out what all you
can do, you're hooked). Just record the steps and run the macro as many
times as necessary. For added convenience, put the macro(s) on a toolbar!
> Master Documents do not work! I have lost work in testing
> this feature and I have known 5 others who have lost files or
> significant work trying to use this feature. You can construct long
Yes they do. But not consistently. Add me to your list of people who've
lost significant amounts of work. Master Docs seem to *hate* tables. If
you can avoid tables, you can get up to about 400-450 pages before it has
memory problems (I build huge TOCs; this caused my memory limitations - even
though I have 32MB RAM). Really, the worst problem with the master docs is
that other people hate them so much, and nobody else can figure out how to
manage the document (so *you're* stuck with it for life!).
> Generally, Word 6.0 is solid. I use it to produce technical
> publications of average length (100-500 pages).
Hear, hear! Although I sometimes wonder about whether a DTP might not be
more powerful for the 200+ page documents, I still haven't made the leap...
mainly because I must distribute soft copies of my documents. Almost
everyone has Word. Not everyone has Frame (or whatever DTP).
> let me recommend three books that will help you grok Word.
Not only did I get a good laugh out of your inspired use of the verb "grok",
but your suggestions are great. Woody Leonhard's books, especially, are
good for a laugh, particularly if you're ready to cry!
