atw: Re: Master/sub-documents and corruptions.
- From: "Lewington, Warren J (WT)" <warren.lewington.ext@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2009 01:16:01 -0400
Oh, lets all face it, MS Word is at times woefully inadequate and
requires all these un-written, undocumented "rules" to work. The ten
caveats I suggest were probably in the minds of the developers when they
were piecing the master/sub-document architecture and code together -
because boy, when you use them the whole shebang works really well. I
strongly suspect it was just never documented within MS Word in the
first place - I mean if they had spent the time with that documentation
like the Fields help they would go through the ten caveats. Also
consider the misunderstandings about Styles and Formatting in general.
Yeah, look the process does seem complicated, but, at the end of the
day, the ten caveats that I provide there are pretty basic stuff. And
the 10 items are functions that we all use, to varying degrees loosely
and tightly, whenever we are working in Word.
My main point is to be rigorous when using master/sub-documents. And
ABSOLUTELY!
These are not for the faint hearted, or the person trying to get
something done quickly. It takes planning and some cooperative
organisation. The more people involved, the more planning and
cooperation.
My secondary point is to ensure people understand that
master/sub-documents can work and are a useful tool when applied
properly. I am not a prophet suggesting that we all should paradigm
shift and start using them and bugger everything else.
Just, when you do, do it properly, and do it well. Like, isn't that what
we are supposed to be doing as professionals???
Remember; keep your mind open to all possibilities.
Regards,
Warren
-----Original Message-----
From: austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Suzy
Sent: Monday, 29 June 2009 14:47
To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: atw: Re: Master/sub-documents and corruptions.
Warren!
LOL - this is going to keep me going for a week I reckon.
Have you read your post?
Do you really think that a piece of software that needs all these
undocumented rules to be followed and manually implemented by the author
in order to ensure that the software a) works as expected and b)enables
the author to publish or retrieve the documents in a reliable and
predictable way; ie in a way that does not significantly disrupt the
work process?
This is how you would design it??
Forgive me, but sometimes I think we are working with these tools for so
long that we just get used to being an expert; and believe that knowing
the workarounds and the over-rides to achieve a predictable result it's
all good.
I don't use Master docs, but I do see my reaction in the faces of my
customers when I confidently tell them what they need to do to have
trouble free documents in Microsoft Word.
Thank you for the reminder. Gold, pure gold.
I'm with the MVP site.
And thank you for documenting all those caveats so that I will know what
to do should a customer inflict their master doc on me.
regards
Suzy
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