Career advice--which application to focus on: FM or Word?

[Jon Harvey]

I agree with most of what you have said about Word. For large documents,
you are often better off using a piece a cardboard and a crayon than
having to resort to Word. However, I've found that Word's autonumbering
feature works better than most people (including me) have complained
about. I used to get extremely frustrated with it until I quite
literally had an epiphany one day and realized how it actually works.
After some testing, I was able to set up a 300-page document with
paragraphs that were autonumbered six levels deep: x., x.x, x.x.x,----,
x.x.x.x.x.x that also included autonumbered figures and tables. It was
also quite stable, things didn't magically mess up. I was so happy with
my new discovery that I almost took the rest of the day off.

The biggest problem I have found with Word's autonumbering feature is
that it is documented so incredibly poorly and isn't very intuitive.
And, although it does work, the same feature is so much easier to
understand and use in FrameMaker.

-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces+jharvey=cambridgesoft.com at lists.frameusers.com
[mailto:framers-bounces+jharvey=cambridgesoft.com at lists.frameusers.com]
On Behalf Of Diane Gaskill
Sent: Friday, May 19, 2006 8:12 AM
To: framers at FrameUsers.com
Subject: RE: Career advice--which application to focus on: FM or Word?

Word is also a memory hog.  It uses more than twice as much RAM as FM at
launch and sucks up more as time goes on.  It often runs out of memory
and
sends error messages about no longer letting you undo anything.  If you
are
working in a Word doc over 150 pages or so, you are definitely taking
chances and are likely to experience Word literally slowing down and
eventually grinding to a halt.

The Word autonumbering bug is horrendous to put it nicely.  Bulleted and
numbered lists are reformatted for you while you sleep (whether you want
them to be or not).  When you open the doc again, numbers have changed
to
bullets, numeric lists are now alpha lists and start with e instead of
1, or
if you are lucky and they are still numbered, they start with 430
instead of
1.

This is not a joke folks, I see this every day at work.  We have created
some workarounds, but to answer Steve's question, it is NOT worth it.
Fortunately, we have also have FM, and are beginning to convince the
powers
that be how much more stable and efficient FM is.

Diane

-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces+dgcaller=earthlink.net at lists.frameusers.com
[mailto:framers-bounces+dgcaller=earthlink.net at lists.frameusers.com]On
Behalf Of Steve Rickaby
Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2006 2:39 AM
To: framers at FrameUsers.com
Subject: Re: Career advice--which application to focus on: FM or Word?


At 16:15 -0400 17/5/06, Ron Miller wrote:

>If I experiment with style changes, Word creates a new style like Body
+
blue font + 6 pt line spacing. It handles numbered lists very poorly and
it
is quirky and seems to lack any coherent use model. Frame on the other,
while not perfect (what software is) and certainly less intuitive at
least
does what you want it to do and doesn't try to do so many things you
wish it
wouldn't.

I think the key difference can be summed up by saying that Word takes a
lifetime to master to the degree at which it can be used to produce
results
comparable to those that can be produced quite easily with Frame. It can
be
done, but is it worth it?
--
Steve
-----Original Message-----
From:  Ron Miller
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 1:15 PM
To: John Posada
Cc: Framers at frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Career advice--which application to focus on: FM or Word?


I agree with John, tools are always changing, but that said, if you have
a choice, Frame is just so much more solid than Word. I've been working
on two projects recently. In one I'm in Word and I'm having the hardest
time just sticking to a template. If I experiment with style changes,
Word creates a new style like Body + blue font + 6 pt line spacing. It
handles numbered lists very poorly and it is quirky and seems to lack
any coherent use model. Frame on the other, while not perfect (what
software is) and certainly less intuitive at least does what you want it
to do and doesn't try to do so many things you wish it wouldn't.

Ron

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