I almost can't believe I am writing this. We hired an internal candidate into a tech writer position. I am trying to mentor/train her. We'll be dealing with Word documents on Windows machines.
I want her to set up a folder structure to manage the files she'll be handling. I suggest Windows Explorer as the "right tool" for doing so.
Instead, she wants to keep everything on her desktop and use a software called "Fences" to manage everything.
I think this is a really bad idea. Am I wrong?
I try to be easygoing and offer "suggestions" rather than dictate things, but am losing patience.
Fences? What the heck is a software called "Fences"?!? Google, thank you for showing me this: Automatically organize your desktop shortcuts and icons with Fences®!. I downloaded & installed the 30 day trial. Because I was curious, I sought information about other similar products and, again, Google, thank you for showing me this: http://www.topbestalternatives.com/fences/. I'll fudge around with Fences before diving into the depths of alternatives.
I contributed to the thread with this post:
I get the points about being new, etc, but there's also the other side of the coin where 'existing people' (I didn't say 'old' on purpose <grin>) should also be open to a fresh perspective. It goes both ways.
For example, I worked at a hellhole for a short period of time with a senior department member who insisted on using InDesign with no application of styles - as in manually typing the TOC and the leader dots and the page numbers - for a 150ish page user guide. She would print the entire user guide and manually verify the heading in the body matched the TOC. If there was a discrepancy, she would make changes, reprint, and start over. She bragged about staying past midnight to get the user guide done because of that process. Being the problem-solver type I am, I showed her a small InDesign document with headings and a auto-generated TOC. How many hours could be spent on other tasks if the TOCs were auto-generated? I have no idea because she wasn't even open to a fresh perspective. I believe her exact phrase was styles were "too complicated" to implement. I still shake my head in disagreement. You can't convince me that in an InDesign file it is "too complicated" to apply Headings 1 -4 styles to text that is already manually formatted to look like a heading. I call that ignorance.
FWIW, I downloaded the 30 day trial of Fences and am giving it a test drive. So far, so good. Think of it as creating a folder on your desktop, putting files into that folder and being able to see the files in that folder without double-clicking. You can also make the folders roll up, which has already decluttered my Desktop. That's just my observation after a couple of hours of playing with it.
Sent off-list to Bob:
This is what one of my three monitors now looks like. The red boxes are fences that are set to roll up / be hidden until I mouse over them, the green box are icons I don’t have within a ‘fence’, and the purple boxes are fences I created where I am (currently) putting file types and folders.
The fences are just for ease of grouping things. When I view the Desktop in Windows Explorer, I don’t see any fences – all the files are within the “Desktop” folder:
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