Fields in Word Documents

I sent a draft of a user guide to a co-worker today. In part, this is part of his reply to my email:

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I want to mention that I think it is cool to see that you are using fields in your documents. I proposed doing this in our manuals a few years ago. My proposal was not accepted, so we are still doing it long-hand. I think fields are under utilized.

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I couldn't resist ranting about fields in Microsoft Word so I replied with the following:

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I have two brief stories related to using fields.

From 1998 - 2010, I worked at a company. My co-worker, Brian, was writing documentation before I arrived. The plan was for that portion of his job was to come to me. So, one day, we were looking at one of his Word documents. I think I suggested making a text change to one of the sections. He protested that it would be a lot of work to do that. When I asked for his reasoning, he took me through his process for writing the documentation and for creating the TOC. This was his process:

1. manually type the TOC entries, including the .... to the page number.
2. manually create a bookmark for each heading style in the document (except he didn't use heading style - he used Normal and manually formatted each heading to match what he wanted it to look like)
3. manually type the page number
4. manually create a hyperlink from the page number in the TOC to the bookmark in the body of the document (and make the hyperlink blue & bold by manually applying that formatting to the page number).
5. manually create a section break so that each section had different text in the header.

I was completely dumbfounded. I already had created documentation in Word at a previous company with an auto-generated TOC so I changed his manually formatted Normal "headings" to Heading 1, 2, and 3, inserted a field instead of what he had manually typed. I think he made me do this in a copy of his document because he didn't trust what I was doing, but that detail is a little fuzzy. What is not fuzzy is the look of shock and disbelief that still makes me chuckle. He nearly fell out of his chair when I had him Ctrl+A, F9, and he saw how what I had done automatically would update the TOC.

At a different company, the documentation was written in InDesign. My co-worker manually typed the TOC, same way as Brian at the other company, including the ... between the text and the page number. For the 200+ page user guide she was working on, she would then print the entire user guide so she could manually verify that the page number in the TOC matched the page number in the body. If she found a discrepancy, she reprinted the user guide. She told me a story about how she had to be up past midnight so that she could verify the TOC was correct by 9 AM. Their process was to send a PDF of the user guide to a print vendor, who then printed a set number of hard copies, and if the TOC was incorrect and 10 copies had been printed, it was an expensive mistake.

When I heard her story of woe, I had no idea how to set up a TOC in InDesign as I had never used that tool before I started there. By the end of the day, I had figured how to set up Heading styles as well as how to create an equivalent of a field in Word. The next day, when I showed her how easy it would be to use this, she rejected my suggestion. Her comment was that it looked "too complicated" to implement. To my knowledge, they are still manually typing a TOC instead of using what took me a day to figure out. Part of me wants to know, the other is okay with ignorance to how much time my "too complicated" technique would have saved her over the years.

Thus, if you have a way to make your life easier, I say go for it. It's easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask permission.

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