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Process Management advise, please
I have been working with a university professor on a marketing text book
made up of 20 chapters, each about 100 pages long. Originally, he created the entire thing on his Mac using character formatting, hard returns, and spaces instead of tabs. I spent a couple of weeks reformatting using styles (we have about 30 styles to cover all the situations). Although I was never able to teach him to use styles, it was ok, because it only took a few minutes for me to reformat his changes after each iteration. Now, however, the publisher has hired a freelance editor and a marketing consultant, both of whom are contributing new material and editing existing material. Strangely, none of these new users (publisher, editor, consultant) understands styles - in fact, it turns out they don't even know styles exist. Nor do they know about the collaboration aids in Word, or about bullets, or about automatic caption, or self-updating fields. So when one of these new people wants to change a figure number, for instance, they delete the caption including the figure number field I inserted, and type in a new line, using whatever style was in the previous paragraph. Then they manually reformat the caption to make it look like they want. As a result, the process of managing the formats has become much more difficult. Additionally, I've used Word's equation editor to create equations throughout the text, but somewhere (at the Mac?) the equations are getting crushed; when the documents come back to me, they've been replaced with error codes and grey boxes. The final product must be more or less "camera ready" - the publisher will reset the text using something other than Word, and so they don't care about styles, formats, or any of that. They just want it to look like how we want it. In fact, they would be happier if we just did the whole thing in plain text, and used ASCII codes at the beginning of each 'graph to say how we want that one formatted. Given how complex Word is, and how few people really understand how to use it, my guess is that other people here have faced similar situations. (For instance, Sandra Jensen has posted a similar request just a few days ago). So I would very much appreciated any process management advise people can give. Thanks, jeremy |
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