TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
In today's digest, there were several messages that mentioned linking graphics by file reference in Word. It's been several years since my linked-graphics fiasco but I start sweating bullets just thinking about it. In Word 6.0, we used links for 100's of graphics in a hefty training manual. A few months later, when the client wanted changes, it was impossible to update the graphics although the original graphics files were intact and the paths were still valid. When I told the Word tech support person that the help file recommended using linking to reduce the doc's size, he admitted that it didn't work the way it was supposed to. It took me a long time to scrape together changes for that manual. I'm still not sure how I did it. I suppose things are vastly improved in newer versions of Word. We're now using Word 97 but I can't bring myself to try graphics links.
