Tools and More Tools

On LinkedIn, there was a discussion started by Oana Bota-Achim, a Senior Technical Writer in Romania. She wrote, "If you’re a good technical writer, it doesn’t matter which tool you use. Agree?"

There were 38 comments in this discussion. It's not my place to summarize the points discussed. I was inspired, though, by Joe Devney's post below to vent here, rather than in the discussion.

Here's what Joe wrote:

And here's where my mind went when I read what Joe wrote:
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What gets me re: tools is when a tool is simply not used correctly - pounding a nail with a screwdriver.

I was in a situation where InDesign was being used for software documentation. It might as well have been in Word with Normal style throughout and manual formatting.

Among many *many* issues with the doc I worked on, there was a hand-typed TOC in a 200-ish page document. Part of the 'release' process was to print this ID file and manually compare the TOC to the actual page. Then, when there were discrepancies found - not "if there were" as there always were - the TOC was then manually updated, the file reprinted, and the process began again. I have no idea how long this process was in place or how many hours it consumed.

Then the troublemaker (me) arrived. When I found out that's what was being done, even though I had never used ID before, I investigated how to set up the TOC so it could be updated when text in a heading was changed or a page break was inserted.

The attitudes about Word that I encountered when I compared what I wanted to do in ID to what could be done in Word still makes me chuckle. This is basically how the conversation went:

Me: You can have a TOC in ID and have it be automatically updated. It'll work like the way Word works where you don't have to manually type page numbers.
Response: But ID is soooo much better than Word! Word is terrible! We don't want to do anything like the way Word works.

That thud was my head against my desk. There was nothing but disgust when I showed this functionality in a "proof of concept" file. I may have well been suggesting the doc be written in Klingon.

The ignorance was enlightening as there was ZERO interest in making life easier. It was dismissed - "too complicated" was the phrase used.

To this day, I do not really know why using a tool the "right" way was so soundly rejected so quickly. Maybe it had to do with the thought that the doc process had always been a time-consuming process and if it was suddenly more efficient, there would be more work that would be done, which would interfere with the daily coffee breaks and longer than an hour lunches. I thought I was doing a good thing. After all, I had heard the horror stories of how it was common to be working on documentation late into the night prior to a release - all because there were issues with the TOC.

The moral of the story is that you can have the 'best' tool in the world but you have to be able to use it.
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I really like it when I read something that then inspires me to write something.