Process Management advise, please

Barb Reinhardt wrote:
Suzanne, that assumes that the other contributors are willing to use the
features. I've worked on a document with one other individual and it's
been a nightmare because he hasn't used the additional features.

Well, if he uses Word 2003, it's not a choice anymore for the
contributor: He won't be able to change your styles or create new ones,
for instance.

But again, this feature is fairly new and there have been reports of
problems with it, so I cannot yet recommend it wholeheartedly.

Greetinx
..bob
--
/"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign | MS
\ / | MVP
X Against HTML | for
/ \ in e-mail & news | Word

As Bob says, the whole idea of IRM in Word 2003 is to force other users to
conform to specific guidelines. You can limit the choice of styles, for
example.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"Barb Reinhardt" wrote in message
...
Suzanne, that assumes that the other contributors are willing to use the
features. I've worked on a document with one other individual and it's
been a nightmare because he hasn't used the additional features.

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote in message
...
I think these features may work properly only if all the other
contributors
also have Word 2003.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup
so
all may benefit.

"Robert M. Franz" wrote in message
...
Hi Jeremy

jg70124 wrote:
[..]
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.

I have yet to test this thoroughly in real-life projects, but the new
protection-features of Word 2003 Prof. might be worth investigating in
your situation.

2cents
.bob
--
/"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign | MS
\ / | MVP
X Against HTML | for
/ \ in e-mail & news | Word

On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 15:19:31 GMT, Robert M. Franz wrote:

Well, if he uses Word 2003, it's not a choice anymore for the
contributor: He won't be able to change your styles or create
new ones, for instance.

But again, this feature is fairly new and there have been
reports of problems with it, so I cannot yet recommend it
wholeheartedly.

Hmmm.... that could be the reason to switch from 2002 to 2003 (cuz
I haven't heard of any other good reasons, except the sharing
potential, but we don't have a SharePoint server). What types of
problems have you encountered?

--
JN

jbn 'won'oh'won'six'won' at fastmail.fm
Remove spaces, and substitute digits for the words between " ' "

Hi Joseph

Joseph N. wrote:
Hmmm.... that could be the reason to switch from 2002 to 2003 (cuz
I haven't heard of any other good reasons, except the sharing
potential, but we don't have a SharePoint server).

IMHO, most new features of Office 2003 promise a lot in productivity
gain for workgroups and companies, but the knowledge to exploit it is
rarely present (i.e., it's not something that can be triggered by
end-users or even the typical Word power user unless (s)he spends a
great deal of time for it.


What types of problems have you encountered?

None so far, myself. But it has been reported that certain standard
behaviour of, say, AutoFormat, manages to leave the user in a numbered
paragraph w/o the numbering, even though direct formatting is exactly
what was supposed to be prevented ...

Greetings
..bob
--
/"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign | MS
\ / | MVP
X Against HTML | for
/ \ in e-mail & news | Word

..bob, Thanks for the info. BTW, please sign me up for the ASCII
Ribbon Campaign ;-)

--
JN

jbn 'won'oh'won'six'won' at fastmail.fm
Remove spaces, and substitute digits for the words between " ' "

I have attempted the "circulate memo" route - and I've also provided
hands-on training for a couple of the more prolific contributors.
Unfortunately, it hasn't been very successful. One problem is that this a
loose group of freelancers, each of whom has created their own technology
environment. I can make suggestions, but not issue mandates. The other is
that these folks have been using the program for many years, using methods
they made up because they couldn't figure out how to make the program do
what they thought it should do - thus creating many largely incompatible
ways of working with the program.

It seems a fairly common problem actually. I've been using Office apps (or
there predecessors) since the early 1980's, and have often encountered
people who were either not interested in or didn't have the time to learn
the more complex features of the programs. Sometimes I wish we could all go
back to Word Version 4, or maybe even the old Dec VAX markup tools.

Thanks for the advice and interest, though.

"Jezebel" wrote in message
...
Reminds me of the famous advice to sailors caught in a storm on a lee
sho rule 1 -- do not let yourself get caught in this situation.

About all that's to be done is circulate a memo to the effect that the
other
participants are contributing *content*, and when they've finished doing
so
you (or somebody) will be creating the camera-ready version, as a
separate,
final exercise. If the publishers are paying for it, let them know that
the
cost of that final exercise is partly a function of how those other
participants do their work. Even if the consultants don't understand
styles,
the publisher probably does -- most publishing houses have style guides of
some sort or another. Not quite the same thing, but close enough that
they'll know what you mean if you say the consultant isn't following your
style conventions.

For a 2000 page book, this is a lot of work you're looking at!






"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote in message
...
I'm afraid I don't have any advice to offer, but you have my deepest
sympathy. The situation you describe [which is certainly not uncommon]
is
why I try to limit my work to situations where I have control over the
final
version and can provide camera-ready copy.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup
so
all may benefit.

"jg70124" wrote in message
...
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

Ah ha - this may indeed help me out.

Question: are toolbars created in Word XP compatible (and transferable) to
Word X.2 (for Mac)?

The primary author is wedded to the Mac, which he thinks is easier. It may
be, but it's also easier for him to invent klugey work-arounds to do things
as he thinks they ought to be done.

J

"Jonathan West" wrote in message
...
With regard to trying to persuade the other authors to use styles, this
article might help you

Creating Custom Toolbars for Templates
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/P...cle.asp?ID=262

Once you have created a Styles toolbar in the way described in the
article,
point out to theother authors that clicking on the appropriate button is
quicker & easier than doing manual formatting.


--
Regards
Jonathan West - Word MVP
www.intelligentdocuments.co.uk
Please reply to the newsgroup

"jg70124" wrote in message
...
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

"jg70124" wrote in message
...
Ah ha - this may indeed help me out.

Question: are toolbars created in Word XP compatible (and transferable) to
Word X.2 (for Mac)?

The primary author is wedded to the Mac, which he thinks is easier. It
may
be, but it's also easier for him to invent klugey work-arounds to do
things
as he thinks they ought to be done.


You will want to test it on the various versions of Word that the template
will need to support, but broadly the answer to this question is "yes". If
you have any particular problems with getting Mac compatibility to work,
then a post to microsoft.public.mac.office.word will bring the MacWord
experts to your assistance.


--
Regards
Jonathan West - Word MVP
www.intelligentdocuments.co.uk
Please reply to the newsgroup