OT: Word (was Re: Frame vs. Flare for My Needs)

[Roger Shuttleworth]

Hi Steve

Very amusing, but only to those observing. I'm sure we all have similar 
horror stories. Mine was a 75-page RFP that Sales said "has to go out 
this afternoon". The future of the known universe depended on it. The 
sales guy had fiddled, and it had blown up, so he passed it to me. By 
about 4.30 pm I had saved the world.

I later found out that Sales used the same RFP document for everything, 
just changing the specifics and re-saving it. Who needs templates?

You are right on the money. It's a nightmare scenario. The OP's need for 
training versions sounds like just the job for conditional text, or for 
attribute filtering if the content is structured.

Roger


On 26/02/2015 11:36 AM, Steve Rickaby wrote:
> I do not think I have posted this story to this group before, so, as Word is being discussed...
>
> This really happened: I was there, I watched.
>
> Long time ago, I worked as a contractor for a small but upwardly mobile company. At that time the staff occupied a single floor of an office block in West London, a couple of directors, a secretary and a bunch of very bright and highly-paid engineers.
>
> One of the senior staff came in with the words 'This memo is urgent: can you get it out quickly.' (Probably a strategic error, triggering a local perturbance in the Universal Murphy Field). The secretary set to work typing up the one-page memo in Word. Something went wrong, she struggled with it, and got nowhere. So she called over one of the very bright and highly-paid engineers to help. He struggled with it and got nowhere, so he called over another very bright and highly-paid engineer. I don't know what they were struggling with, but the words 'I've never seen it do that before' occurred more than once.
>
> After a while most of the company's technical staff were helping the poor girl to lash Word into producing this one-page memo. Finally they succeeded, and the print command was issued. The printer jammed. One of the highly-paid engineers unjammed the printer. The print command was issued again... and again the printer jammed. I cannot remember how many times this happened, but I do distinctly remember that at the very point when the printer was finally coaxed into life, just as I thought 'Surely, nothing else can go wrong'... the toner cartridge exploded.
>
> I am not making this up.
>