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Gene said:
> I usually just ask candidates a few questions about how they've dealt with information
> received from others in Word format to see what (if anything) they do to prevent style
> corruption from occurring, and how they deal with existing documents in which it may already have occurred.
For smaller amounts of info, say, several pages at most, I just copy and paste it into Notepad, then copy from there into my authoring app (even if that's Word).
If it was a large amount of text, going from a Word doc into a Word doc, I suppose I'd try to recall how to do what Rick (was it?) described a few posts back.
But mostly, if I'm taking incoming text verbatim, no matter how big the source, I'm really plucking chunks of it (so Notepad...), and not just "prettying up" somebody else's complete document.
I usually get my info from several sources (developers and architects, testers, integrators, pre-sales engineers, tech support, and sometimes even PLM), and then I synthesize for my docs. It very occasionally happens that a paragraph or section from somebody else's document or e-mail is suitable, as-is, for my customer-facing docs, so it's no hardship to just funnel it all through Notepad and then edit and format, or just format, in my current weapon-of-choice.
It's not elegant, but it's never given me trouble, and it helps me to see it unformatted, to get my editing hat screwed on properly.
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