atw: Re: Replacing Word (Long...)
- From: James Hunt <jameshunt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2011 17:37:33 +1000
It is interesting to see how some comments here have over-generalised my
argument, and taken it to places where I did not want to go.
My proposals come from my own experience working on software projects and
writing documentation for engineering products. The smallest project I ever
worked on employed only two people; the largest project involved a
multinational group producing engineering documentation in twelve languages.
I am concerned with a free, scaleable technical writing solution that covers
these extremes, within the field of software and engineering documentation -
nothing more. I have a "project deliverables" view of the writing process, and
I am not particularly concerned with the general run of corporate documents.
Documents produced as project deliverables are generally not passed around for
comments and communal editing in the way that many corporate documents are.
Communal reviews are important as a way of producing agreement on corporate
objectives, and thus can serve as management tools in their own right. Word
appears to be very suitable for the communal production of documents, and
everyone in a company should have a copy of Word for this purpose. We can take
that argument one step further, and state that everyone should have the most
up-to-date version of Word, because if a Word document comes into the company
from outside and it cannot be read, time and money may be lost. This is a sort
of market share effect: everyone else has Word, and so we need it too. I
recognize the value of Word for general corporate purposes and wish it were
better, but that is a discussion for another time and, in fact, for another
forum.
I am saddened by the thread of defeatism in some comments: that's the way it
is, we can't change it, get used to it, we just do what we are told to do, and
use the tools we are told to use.
We will never make progress if we don't think about alternatives...
JH
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