If I Had My Document Way…
…is a new series of posts where I suggest improvements (or just rant) about some of the things which I think should be done to make my life – and all my colleagues lives – a lot easier when using MS Word or other complex tools to create technical documents.
It seems that in every project I work on, I end up having to recreate the standard template from scratch, just to fix the years of tweaks and changes that have been made to an original template. Then people would paste in text from another document, with some ganky styles attached, and it all gets into a mess.
I also try and educate people about why it’s important to create structured documents correctly. Am I the right person to do that? I don’t know, but my job does require documents to be created in a particular way, so I do have a vested interest.
Disclaimer: these opinions are my own. I use MS Word to create technical documents, so YMMV when creating more complex or fancy publications. Maybe your style guide says you should have section breaks everywhere and use columns – good luck with that. In general, I believe MS Word is hugely overpowered for use in most common workplaces.
Let me know if you have any document creation hints, tips, issues, problems, bugbears, bees in bonnets, rants or opinions, and I’ll include them.
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