Re: Fm vs Word

[larry.kollar@xxxxxxxxxx]

> We currently have all our manuals in FM 6. There is a suggestion by
> management to put everything on Word so more people can work on the
> changes. I am the only one who knows FM. ...

Who are the "more people" involved? Can you offer informal
training in-house?

> I cannot convince them that Word is not made for long
> complicated documents.
>
> We have some chapters that are over 200 pages and full of tables and
> graphics.

Urk!!!  I used to use Word for 600+ page manuals, but none of them
had 200-page chapters. I remember that Word got seriously flaky once
chapters got bigger than 50 pages or so; my workaround was to break
them up.


> Give me some ammo to defend my case for FM. Use horror stories and
> personal experience to make it real.

I can say that I used Word for 13 years, and have been using Frame
for the last 5 years. I used to be a Word advocate. *Used* to be.
I still find myself missing a Word feature every once in a while,
but I also don't have crashes that destroy an entire day's worth
of work. I remember one Word crash that scrambled a file so badly
that I had to use a text editor to extract the plain text, weed
out all the trash, and re-format everything. That took a day & a
half to fix, and the chapter wasn't all that long. About the only
way to lose a lot of data to a Frame crash is to create a new file
& not do "Save As" some time before the crash (autosave doesn't
seem to work with new untitled files).

One thing that management types understand is "time is money." You
might want to consider converting one document to Word, and keep a
running total of all the time it took to clean things up (a one-
shot event, but the time costs probably will exceed the difference
in cost between Frame & Word by itself). More importantly, keep
records of time lost to crashes & file corruption -- these can be
expected to recur often. Those 200-page chapters will probably
choke Word without much effort. Missed deadlines due to Word
breakage become a strong possibility. Show them how much $$$ it's
going to cost to replace a good tool with a poor one, and they'll
probably reconsider. It will help if you can figure out a good
way for the manager(s) in question to save face while they drop
the idea.


I should probably point out that while I had a reasonably good
workflow going with Word, that was Word 6/Word 95. Word 6 was
seriously bloated, but the scripting environment made it worth
using. I haven't used any of the later versions heavily, but
have tried them out on occasion. It's a struggle to make numbering
work right, for starters. The bloat has just gotten out of hand.

Word is good at what it's meant for -- short documents with a
decorative look -- but it's just not meant for maintaining
large documents (or suites of large documents).

--
Larry Kollar, Senior Technical Writer, ARRIS
"Content creators are the engine that drives
value in the information life cycle."
    -- Barry Schaeffer, on XML-Doc



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