Re: MS Word screws up yet ANOTHER project

["Raj Machhan" <raj -dot- machhan -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Hi,

One must understand that MS Word is just a word processing tool. Nothing
else. Even Microsoft recognozed that. That is why we have MS Publisher for
the job.

Raj

On Dec 7, 2007 8:21 PM, <poshedly -at- bellsouth -dot- net> wrote:

> Nothing you guys haven't heard about before now. And nothing anyone here
> can do. I'm just venting.
> (As John Lennon once sang it, "And nothing to get hung about!" BTW, his
> sad day is tomorrow, Dec. 8.)
>
> But yet once again, as of a few minutes ago (and it's now about 9:50 a.m.
> Eastern Standard Time in the U.S. as I complete this message), MS Word,
> the program that won't be fixed and won't go away, just undid weeks of work
> in an instant -- without me even touching a key. It simply changed the font
> and spacing in all of the dozens of tables in the 164-page manual I'm
> currently working on.
>
> Yep, whereas eveything in all of the tables was set to Arial 10 pt with
> preset spacings in place, in the blink of an eye -- and with no action by me
> -- I saw it magically change to Times Roman and goofed-up spacings.
>
> Yes, the "S"-word is applicable here!
>
> This happened a week ago as well in yet another of the books I'm
> completing (that one is around 230 pages). And it took days to go back and
> redo those tables.
>
> Yes, I checked the attributes and anything else that I thought that could
> explain this, but it simply wasn't something that anybody here or who I know
> outside the company could explain, except that I was told the time-worn
> phrase, "Yes, Word sometimes does that."
>
> My contract is about up and I've approached management about new projects;
> in the meantime, they've finally ordered FrameMaker 8.0 (I've used Frame
> for about 9 years, and have even smoothly completed 900-page manuals with
> it). There's no telling if I'll be here when FrameMaker arrives, but it
> would be nice.
>
> And yes, it's an engineering firm which has never had a tech writer on
> staff before. So they find it no big deal since none ofthem have had this
> happen to THEM. All the docs here were either done by the engineers in Word
> or else they use vendor docs (which REALLY suck!). (My company is really A1
> and designs and builds cement manufacturing facilities -- mess up with this
> stuff and you become part of your surroundings.)
>
> -- Kenpo in Atlanta
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Create HTML or Microsoft Word content and convert to Help file formats or 
printed documentation. Features include support for Windows Vista & 2007 
Microsoft Office, team authoring, plus more.
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True single source, conditional content, PDF export, modular help.
Help & Manual is the most powerful authoring tool for technical
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