Some Good News

I work with MS Word on a daily basis. I have worked with the tool since 1994, using Word 2.0 at a marketing research firm. I am continually amazed at how misused the software is and when I see things that are clearly wrong, I chuckle.

That's the background for Monday. My co-worker in a different department, came over and asked if I had a MS Word template. He said he had a document that was really ugly and he was considering a fresh start. I put a copy of the template I've been working on in a shared directory and showed him how there are styles set up in it. He thanked me and went on his way.

Yesterday, he returned to my cubicle. "Can you come down and look at this document?" he asked.

We walked down and he showed me his document. It was ugly.

Very ugly.

What do I use to determine if a document is ugly?

1. How about the number of times Normal is applied in the document? In the original document, it was applied as follows:
   
   
   
   
2. This is the template that was associated with the template, except I've garbled the text. Look how long it is!
   C:\DOCUME~1\USERID\LOCALS~1\Temp\TCD157.tmp\
   Abcdefghij abcdefgh abcde abcde abcdefghijk abcdefgh, abcde abcde.dot
3. How about manually adding what appears to be the heading row in the middle of the document? (I can't share what that looks like because it is a confidential document.)

The more I talked with my co-worker, the more distraught he seemed to be getting. I knew what I was suggesting to him was beyond his Word skills. Eventually, I said, "Do you want me to ask my manager if I can work on it?" Less than a second after I said that, he said, "Yes!"

It turns out that I was nearly done with the document I had been working on. I returned to my cubicle, finished up the doc, and then went to talk to my manager. She approved that I could work on it for 8 hours.

I'm done after 4.

I really like being able to help my co-worker. So far, I've been here 1 year, 9 months, 6 days. I like that I am developing a reputation as the MS Word guru. I've always been the tools guru. I gravitate towards figuring out how to do what I want with the tool (meaning software) I have to work with because it (ultimately) makes me more productive. This dates back to 2/12/1995, my first day of being a professional technical writer.

1. OfficeVision, Visio, MS Word
2. MS Word, Doc-to-Help
3. OfficeVision, RoboHelp, MS Word, Dreamweaver, JWalk, MS DOS batch files, PaintShop Pro
4.  InDesign
5. MS Word, FatWire

Notice a theme? I like MS Word!