Additon to John's Upgrade to Word 97 Summary

[Kathleen Frost <kfrost -at- BTSQUARED -dot- COM>]

RE:  John Cornellier's Summary   Upgrade to Word 97

I appreciate John taking the time to summarize the responses.  These things
always help all of us.

My problem is that I didn't see anything relating to the devastating
problems Office 97 can cause.

At our office, there was a server problem that wiped out the network
version of Word (for NT) that the programmers and many of the management
people were using.  The network administrator decided to load Office 97 and
let everyone hook up to it.  (Fortunately for our company's continuing
business, I was running Word as stand-alone on my PC and didn't touch the
97 software on the server.  I have ALL documents and online help relating
to 8 products on my machine and stored/locked in MKS source control so no
one can corrupt them.)

For everyone else, the problems began immediately.  You could print the
same document twice, the first would be fine, while in the second, all the
graphics were missing and the space was just a box with a big black X.
The same problems could happen between closing a file you were working on
one day and opening it the next.  Microsoft tech support was no help.
Their solution was to start a new document, cut and paste the text only in
chunks into the new doc, then a very time consuming, 7-step procedure to
recover and paste each graphic from an older version of the file that still
had graphics to the new document, one at a time.  With a total of over 2000
pages of documentation, nearly that in online help, and hundreds of
graphics in each of our manuals, it would have taken well over a month to
recover all our help and documentation if we'd switched to 97.   As it is,
we have no graphics left in any existing functional specs.  Every one of
them was lost and most can't be recreated.

Until the rest of the bugs are worked out of Office 97 and the company can
guarantee these problems won't continue, we have a policy not use the 97
for any critical material or anything with graphics.

If others have used it successfully, I'm happy for them.  But being the
only tech writer in my office, the one who would have to do all the
recovery work, I can't recommend it.  I do recommend that if you use 97, be
sure you do lots of back ups and version control so that recovery is at
least possible if the same problems sneak up and "get 'cha."

Good Luck

Kathy Frost
KFrost -at- BTSquared -dot- com

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