Re: Real World Advantages of Office / Word 2007 and Windows 7

["William Sherman" <bsherman77 -at- embarqmail -dot- com>]

In one particular case I am thinking of, several software engineers wanted 
to keep the systems operation manual up to date as they felt the tech 
writers didn't understand the system software. Small wonder, when I got 
there, we were not allowed to turn it on or run it. I never got to see it in 
operation from start up, operation, and shut down. I got to see bits and 
pieces at various times because I was constantly going into the lab, but how 
was I to ever know how it work?

The problem is that on their computers, some had Word set to automatically 
update styles and formats.  When they would manually number, they would 
affect the numbering in other sections. When they would bold a section for 
emphasis, they would impact other sections. There must have been 20 "Normal" 
styles in that document, not to mention a dozen list styles and so on. 
Headings?  There wasn't H1, H2, H3, H4, there were a dozen. H1, H1bold, 
H1centered, H1italic,Heading 1, Heading1, Heading 1 Centered, etc.

I don't know how long they had been putting pieces in, but I had to bail 
them out occasionally when they would scramble it all. I told my boss I 
refused to ever work on that manual other than to stop and help them with a 
single problem, and if he insisted on bringing it back into our fold, he 
needed to set aside 6 months to fix it.

There would be things like a procedure on page 203 that went:

Paragraph
1.
2.
  a.
  b.
3.
4.
5.


And then on page 473, you would have another list.

Paragraph
1.
2.
3.
4.
  a.
  b.
5.

If they added two lines in on page 473 between step 3 and 4, instead of it 
going

Paragraph
1.
2.
3.
4.
  a.
  b.
5.


It would go

Paragraph
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
4.
  a.
  b.
5.

Because the steps for 4 and 5 were tied in sequence to page 203 and not to 
the procedure on 473.

The solution was to cut and paste into Notepad, then cut and paste in Word 
and format again, right?  Wrong. Now procedures on page 513 and 269 and 624 
and who knows where else would scramble.

How they pulled some of this off, I still haven't figured out.  The 
"solution", as wrong as it seems, was to manually put in numbers so that 
they didn't connect to anything. You have to remember these things were 
usually found 2 days before shipping, as the software engineers held this 
until the last possible day to include the latest and greatest code changes, 
and there was no time to fix it right.

And numbered lists weren't the only styles connected and messed up like 
this.






----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>
To: <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2012 2:04 PM
Subject: Re: Real World Advantages of Office / Word 2007 and Windows 7