Re: New TECHWR-L Poll Question - Word Doc Sizes

Subject: Re: New TECHWR-L Poll Question - Word Doc Sizes
From: Al Geist <al -dot- geist -at- geistassociates -dot- com>
To: TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 09 Jan 2006 11:12:28 -0500

Like others, I have worked on Word documents shorter than 10 pages that gave me fits and longer than 100 pages that worked smoothly. I can say the same about WordPerfect documents, although they seemed to have fewer problems overall. I've also worked on Pagemaker documents that were 16 pages and crashed on a regular basis and PageMaker documents over 250 pages long that worked like a charm. In most cashes, the instability was caused by a plethora of personal styles imported by a multitude of developers without someone designated as the controller.

Personally, I believe that as much as we'd like to bash Microsoft, the problem with stability is directly related to how the document was originally created. If you have a dozen developers, each using their own personal styles, feeding one document, you have problems If you have one person who is relatively skilled with Word collecting the information from the 12 developers and merging that information into one document, regardless of the program (Word, WordPerfect, PageMaker, InDesign, etc.) then you will probably have far fewer problems.

Then again, my view is tainted right now as I am finishing cleaning up a 200 page Word document created by six developers in three weeks and pawned off as a "technical manual." Had to do the old copy-and-paste method (the Maggie method) to get rid of the instability...even cleaning up the styles wouldn't help.

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Al Geist, Geist Associates
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References:
New TECHWR-L Poll Question - Word Doc Sizes: From: Lisa M. Bronson
Re: New TECHWR-L Poll Question - Word Doc Sizes: From: Bill Swallow

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