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RE: Revisiting Frame vs. Word in light of new capabilities
Subject:RE: Revisiting Frame vs. Word in light of new capabilities From:"Jonathan West" <jwest -at- mvps -dot- org> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 24 Feb 2005 18:44:33 -0000
>
> I believe an expert user of Word can make it work, if you get away
> from built-in numbering, add macros to stabilize the use of styles,
> divorce the document as much as possible from Normal.dot, etc.
It doesn't take an expert user to create a non-normal.dot template and
properly populate it with styles. Macros are not necessary for the purpose.
I accept that the built-in numbering is a mess and that it requires a good
deal of care.
It doesn't require even an intermediate user of Word to use a template that
has been set up well, though a greater degree of expertise is necessary for
the initial work of setting it up. But that expertise is easily acquirable,
there are plenty of places on the web where you can learn how to do it. For
instance, take a look at these 2 articles, which have been available for
some years.
Those two articles give you pretty much all you need in order to get a
template going with a set of styles for a long document.
>
> But, a intermediate or entry-level user can do those same things with
> FrameMaker out of the box.
Oh, so the styles don't need any adjustment for different document types in
Frame?? And modifying the styles is so much more intuitive in Frame than
Word that it requires no learning?
I'm not trying to knock Frame. Instead, I'm trying to point out that many
people confuse themselves into thinking that the UI of a particular software
package is intuitive when in fact it is merely familiar.
I remember some years ago, I gave a friend one of my old computers as a
retirement present, set up for basic email and browsing. He had little or no
past experience of computers, so I went round to his house to show him how
to use Outlook Express for email. I had thought that OE was a pretty basic &
obvious program to use. I was wrong! It was a real education to me,
answering his questions and realising that my assumptions regarding how easy
it was were wildly wrong. I then realised that OE was not intuitive,
although it was familiar to me. But it wasn't familiar to my friend, and he
struggled with the basic concepts for quite a while.
Since then, I do not make the mistake of thinking that Word is intuitive,
but I am seeing some people here make that mistake regarding Frame.
I'm an expert in Word, I have hardly used Frame at all. I am not making a
comparison between them as I do not feel qualified to do so. But I *do* feel
qualified to correct somebody if they say "Word can't do that" when it can.
I've edited 3,000-page documents on a quarterly revision cycle using Word,
and I know it can handle that kind of treatment, even back to the days of
Word 97.
>
> Word's main problem is lack of stability for long documents.
It does not lack long document stability, provided you take the same sort of
care over document design and structure that you would (have to) take for
Frame. A friend of mine who is familiar with both packages says that the
best possible primer for learning how to do long documents in Word is the
Framemaker reference manual!
> It's
> missng other things, like numbering that works reliably,
The numbering is reliable, it is just so badly designed that it doesn't do
what you expect it to out of the box. I can tell you that many, many
experienced users (myself included) have been hitting Microsoft over the
head about this. They are aware of the problem.
The Word MVP site has just acquired a new article by Margaret Aldis giving
various options for controlling numbering.
If you read the article and experiment with the techniques there, you too
can become an expert at taming Word's numbering.
> being able to
> insert graphics and lay them out, more than one or two to a page,
Huh? Of course you can insert more than one or two graphics to a page! Where
on earth did you get the idea that it couldn't?
> hypertext index,
Agreed, the page numbers in the index are not hyperlinks.
> cross-references to styles other than the ones that
> come as headings in Normal.dot, etc.
You can cross-reference to more or less anything you want in Word. What were
you thinking you can't do?
>
> Translation has nothing to do with this.
>
> I'd say, if the argument is that Word can do what FrameMaker can, and
> FrameMaker can do what Word can, then all your left with is the cost
> of migrating content and legacy documents ... for no gain.
>
> But, I would argue that FrameMaker's stability, which makes it more
> efficient, and its accessibility to a less experienced operator make
> it less costly over the long haul.
The thing to realise is that if you want to use Word for long documents
consistently done, you need to do some planning. Specifically you need to
make a template, define some styles and stick to using those styles, and
eliminate manual formatting wherever possible. Word 2003 now has a document
protection feature that can prevent you from using any formatting other than
a list of authorised styles which you can define in the template. If you
assign toolbar buttons and/or keyboard shortcuts to the styles as part of
the building of your template, you can have very rapid and very consistent
formatting which gives you a great deal of stability. The following article
describes how you can do this.
In the short-term it will usually be better to continue using the tool you
are most familiar with. if you are familiar with Frame, that will normally
mean Frame. In the longer term, a change of tools (in either direction) may
need to be considered if a new tool has major capabilities *needed by the
user* which the existing one lacks.
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