Word & Long Docs (WAS re: Career advice-- focus on FM or Word?)

[Diane Gaskill]

Grant, all,

What Steve said is unfortunately true.  We tried it and it simply does not
work correctly. Reporting it to MS several times did not result in any
fixes.  Yes, they knew about it.  No, they did not know when it would be
fixed.  And I add, "if ever."  Perhaps the information below will explain
why.

A few years ago, I managed a tech pubs department at a company in Palo Alto,
CA. We had a remote office in Redmond, WA, about half a mile from the MS
headquarters.  I hired two writers who had previously worked for MS.  During
the interviews, I mentioned that we used FM and they would need to learn it.
They responded that they already knew FM because they used it at MS.

Yes, you read that correctly.  MS was using FM, not Word, to produce large
documents.  Now, however, I understand from a long-time member of this list
who just joined MS, that they are using a home-grown XML-based authoring
tool.  Based on that, I assume that MS is still not using Word for long
docs.  I expect that the product managers at MS are fully aware of Word's
limitations and know that the Word user community is too.  Unfortunately,
there are many VPs who do not know this and attempt to force their people to
use Word for everything.  Only when major deadlines are missed because the
docs cannot be stabilized, do they begin to realize that Word is not the
be-all, end-all, and it is not really "free" after all.

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: Friday, May 19, 2006 10:40 AM
To: framers at FrameUsers.com
Cc: Grant Hogarth
Subject: RE: Word & Long Docs (WAS re: Career advice-- focus on FM or
Word?)


At 08:34 -0600 19/5/06, Grant Hogarth wrote:

>3.	Use a Master Document

Afaik it is universally agreed in the Word community that master documents
are irretrievably broken

--
Steve
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