I was reading the description of an online course called "Graduating from Word to FrameMaker" when something caught my eye.
Dustin Vaughn, Adobe Solutions Consulting Manager, and Stefan Gentz, Adobe's Worldwide Technical Communication Evangelist, teamed up to create an awesome video course that teaches how to take Microsoft Word (MSW) documents into Adobe FrameMaker.
"Word has no book functionality and the master document concept is, well, a concept only," said Gentz. "This is why most Word authors prefer to keep all content in one document, resulting in one big content silo, no re-use of chapters / topics, problems in the translation process, difficult handling, tons of self-written macros to fix tons of problems."
Gentz went on to point out other problems people tend to have with large Word documents including unreliable styles and unpredictable formatting behavior.
"Cross-references tend to break easily and styles change 'magically' in the whole document just because you changed something somewhere," said Gentz.
This phrase intrigued me "styles change 'magically' in the whole document just because you changed something somewhere." As someone who has used MSW since version 2.0, I don't agree with that assessment. Styles change not by magic - nothing in software is "magic" which is why I disapprove of the phrase "The window appears" as a phrase in documentation because of its "magic" connotation - but because you (the user) change a setting. The entire point of using styles (in the first place) is so that when you change a style's definition from 10pt to 12pt, all instances of that style change. If all instances of that style did NOT change, there would be zero point in even using styles. You'd be better off performing multiple (and endless) find and replace actions in the Word document. I'm not sure why Gentz is trying to persuade me to use Framemaker instead of MSW because MSW does what it is supposed to do. The logic falls apart. It almost seems as though Gentz's ignorance of how styles work in MSW.
That said, I do not believe MSW is perfect - no software tool is perfect. There are always software bugs to correct and enhancements to add.
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