Re: WORD, A Word Processor. Was: The Tools Tech Writers Use

[Robert Plamondon <robert -at- PLAMONDON -dot- COM>]

Elna Tynes writes:

> To accuse Microsoft of lying through its teeth about the product's
capabilities
> and failure to fix major bugs for years is to be guilty of some serious
exaggeration.

Do you believe that it's safe to use the Master Document feature?  The
documentation
says it is.  This feature has been known to be broken for years.  It's been
known
to be broken in a way that loses your data, as opposed to simply balking.
Perhaps
this strikes you as a minor bug, or perhaps Microsoft's refusal to document
the
non-functionality of the feature strikes you as being somehow truthful.
I've talked to
people in Microsoft, and Word's bugs are well-known.  This gives rise to the
defensive,
"it's just a memo writer" line, which gets the speaker partly off the hook
at the
expense of contradicting the official company line.

I've used Word to print out memos and mailing labels, and it's okay for
that.  But trying
to do a simple hardware data book of about fifty pages and sixty tables and
illustrations was a complete nightmare.  I had to do with twice -- two books
for two
different clients, and the results were very grim.  Constant crashes and
many features
that simply didn't work.  For example, it's hard to coerce Word to import a
large
spreadsheet from Excel.  The contrast between Interleaf and Frame on the one
hand,
and Word on the other, could not be greater.  Using word made me late,
reduced the quality
of my work, made me very unhappy, and cost my clients thousands of dollars
of extra
labor.  While I admire the tenacity, cleverness, and bag of tricks used by
people who
get Word to limp along in spite of everything, I don't want to be one of
them.

Maybe I'm not being "good enough to Windows," though I thought that a
brand-new factory-
configured Gateway machine running NT with 128 MB would be about as good to
Windows as
you could get.

I wonder what Microsoft uses to create their documentation?  I'll bet they
don't use
Word for anything big or complex.  They have deadlines.

        --Robert
--
Robert Plamondon * High-Tech Technical Writing
36475 Norton Creek Road * Blodgett OR 97326
541-453-5841 * Fax: 541-453-4139
mailto:robert -at- plamondon -dot- com * http://www.pioneer.net/~robertp


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