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Find the document that satisfies the following three criteria:
- it is big...the bigger the better.
- it is very active (most revisions)
- it appears the most like what you would like all your documents to
look.
...in other words, in golfing parlance, your "signature" document.
Convert to Frame, develop your style guide against this document.
Take your second largest/most active document, convert to Frame,
apply styles from the first document to the second. Figure out what
you want to do differently in the second than the first, then if it
also works in the first document better, make the change in the first
and incorporate it into the official style.
Continue this through your library. To me, this had the following two
advantages:
1) What you may find out is that of the 90 documents, only 70 of them
need to be touched; that the other 20 are dead documents and you
didn't know it. Why devote resources to dead documents?
2) By using the largest active document, you will come across a
greater numbr of different styles right off the bat. If you were to
do a small document first, the chance is greater that you will only
come across 3-5 styles. OTOH, do a 230 page document and you may come
across 20-30 different styles.
I used this method in a similar situations and it workd well for
me...ymmv.
> Hi, all. Looking for some procedure opinions. I'm the sole
> techwriter for
> a corp where I manage over 90 documents of varying complexity. At
> the moment, they are 99% in Word. Many tech writers of varying
> expertise have
> worked /h/a/c/k/e/d/ on these documents over the years (I just
> started here a couple months ago and inherited this mess.)
>
> Currently there is no consistent use of styles, templates, fonts or
> structure. Ultimately, I want to convert everything to FrameMaker.
> Here's my question:
>
> Is it better to start converting to Frame right away, or would it
> be wiser
> to get all of the Word documents consistent in style before
> starting the conversion?
=====
John Posada, Senior Technical Writer
"I am a bomb disposal expert. If you see me running, try to keep up." mailto:john -at- tdandw -dot- com, 732-259-2874
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