Re: Any Word on Word?

[Jennifer O Neill <writer -at- ARITECH -dot- COM>]

Al,

In my company we use Pagemaker and Word97. Our manuals
tend to be between 2-80 pages (one is 200 pages but few graphics). The installation manuals can have many graphics so can be large files. Before I joined the company all manuals
were done in Pagemaker. Now its only leaflet-type manuals that
continue to be (2-10 pages). We moved the rest of the manauls to Word because everybody in the company has it, so it's very accessible.

We operate in up to 17 languages (so everything we write is
translated) and our national sales offices need to check the
manuals, often making changes to them to correct for national
market requirements. Giving them a hard copy to check means
that then the documentation team has to type in  the changes in
languages we don't know, with the resulting typing errors. It's more efficient and quicker simply to give the Word file to the sales offices to make the changes themselves. Altho' most manuals are sent to the translation agency, for our smaller markets this isn't economically feasible so they must do the translation themselves, which they can do as they use Word. Altho' some of our sales offices have Pagemaker, none have the time to learn how to use it properly.

The printers certainly prefer Pagemaker but since we started
providing them the Word files in PDF, the printing problems with
Word (eg. line creepage) have been solved.

Because our files move around between so many people, usually we embed the graphics in the Word file rather than use the import feature. This avoids problems of loosing the links between graphic files and word file, but it means we can have some very large files, which can be cumbersome. So with the translators we sometimes remove the graphics (none of which contain text anyway for localisation purposes) and give them this file with a complete hardcopy. This is a problem area as we need to make the files easily accessible but not too cumbersome. Our sales offices aren't always experts in Word. There is a wide skill base, but everyone can work with it. This flexibility is a big plus over Pagemaker.

So far we are more or less happy with Word. It has improved our time to market for manuals as we can now share the work load with the sales offices (we're only 3 in the documentation team). Our translation agencies have never had any problems with any software we have done our manuals in (the 200 page manual cited above started life in Word Perfect but which we wanted put into Word, and the translation agency said fine, no problem), but certainly Word is more widespread amongst professional translators. We don't send Pagemaker leaflets to translators. The sales offices are sent the relevant paragraph(s) to translate themselves  (in Word) & return to us. In spite of its merits, Framemaker is an overkill for us and too complicated for our user base. But our translation agency would have no problem working with it.

Cheers,

Jennifer