RE: Word/Weird

Subject: RE: Word/Weird
From: rebecca rachmany <rebecca -at- COMMERCEMIND -dot- com>
To: "'Tim Altom'" <taltom -at- simplywritten -dot- com>, TechDoc List <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 4 May 2000 06:54:53 +0200

Hi Tim-

I agree with much of what you say. Word has some irritating bugs and some of
them are unavoidable. The example you cite basically says: most people are
unwilling to invest the time in doing it right, which is true. On the other
hand, I have spent days working through problems with Framemaker's crop
marks feature in order to get bleeding room for colored margins. I could
have been doing something wrong, but I asked on the newsgroups, plus
consulted the best local experts I knew, and nobody had any better
solutions.

Regarding far-flung organizations; I don't ascribe to the philosophy that
distance has anything to do with quality or control. The company I ran was
virtual; we had staff meetings no more than twice a year. With 15 people
working at home, the management problems are compounded; it is even more
essential to do things properly and train people carefully. And as
contractors, we routinely got lame documents from varying sources. In fact,
specifically because of that, we found it necessary to use a macro language.
Using Frame would have meant sorting out inconsistencies by hand. Using a
macro language allowed us to save tremendous amounts of time fixing up
formatting errors made by inexperienced users.

My basic argument is that many of the complaints about Word spring from lack
of training, something which is not always an issue with Frame, simply
because you need at least some minimal training before you can get Frame to
really do anything. Just for example, an idiot can get Word's (albeit buggy)
numbering feature to work and customize his numbering scheme. To get Frame's
numbering scheme working and customized, you have to understand at least a
bit about variables and expressions (though you don't need to know the term
"variable" or "expression", that's what it comes down to). Frame has used a
much more robust model at the cost of user learning curves.

Your main contention is completely correct, and I agree with you
wholeheartedly. Word is not designed for long documents. It can be
manipulated to deal with very long documents fairly well; but that is not
the designer's intention. By the same token, Frame is not designed for your
average SME who hits the carriage return at the end of every line and uses
spaces to indent paragraphs. Those people are going to make a mess of
whatever document they touch, and we know it. Let them use Word, I say. Let
them use Notepad, for that matter, because whatever they do to the source
documents, our lives aren't going to be easy. But this is the double-edged
sword. Because you can do stuff with Word without knowing anything, people
tend to just go ahead and play with the features until their document is
corrupt; and then it is too late. As technical writing professionals, we
should give some credit to those who write the source and third-party
manuals, and avail ourselves of these resources and, well, read them, as
drastic as it may seem. We are always complaining that users don't read
manuals, but then we argue that we ourselves don't have time to do so, even
for tools that we use 40-60 hours a week.

I also agree with you that Microsoft isn't honest with their claims. MS has,
IMO, a chronic case of compulsive liar's syndrome. They make ridiculous
claims and they actually believe them. They've done some good things to
relieve the stress on poor souls like us with their MVP program. But by and
large, they have treated users poorly, and they pay the price. However, it's
hard for me to argue Adobe has been kind to the technical writing
professional, with their outrageous pricing and upgrade policies and their
apathetic customer support. They're just smaller and poorer, so people don't
knock them much. Even specialized tools with small installed bases, like
Transit and WYSIWYG help generation tools cost half to a third of what Frame
or Acrobat costs. I think it's easy to argue for Frame when you aren't the
freelancer who is personally dishing out two grand a year to Adobe for
software licenses.

I don't think Word is better than Frame. But I don't think Frame is better
than Word, either. They just are. You use what you have to for each job and
make the best of it. The only point is that "making the best of it" means
learning, whether you have time or not.

Rebecca Rachmany
Commercemind
PO Box 920, Kfar Saba 44109
972-9-7642000 x217
Mobile: 050-900600
rebecca -at- commercemind -dot- com




>>What you haven't mentioned, Rebecca, is that some of Word's
>features can't
>be cured with macros, <snip> You also seem to
>assume that
>you're dealing with either a small, tightly-knit company, or a single
>department, rather than a far-flung enterprise with rapid
>turnover.
>
>I designed and built a tight little template for the one piece
>I was doing,
>just to show that it could be done. Client employees were
>impressed, but
>promptly went back to using Word without the template.
>Templates can lose
>attributes, and most people don't know or don't care how to
>apply the
>
>I think what enrages so many people is that Microsoft isn't
>honest about its
>product, and doesn't actually care about the large-document producers.




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