Accelerated Authoring™ @ Method M

Tech writing forums regularly get hit with questions in the vein of “Word has corrupted my styles”. And the answers that come in are useful for some cases. Such as:

• Always “paste unformatted”.
• Deselect the option to Automatically Update Document Styles.
• Deselect the option to Define Styles Based on Your Formatting.

However, what to do when my files already have helter skelter formatting? For this very need we have included “fix styles” in our Author Max toolkit. Details here.

Be a victim of Word’s automatic formatting “features” no longer. Equip yourself with Author Max and fight back.
Katriel

Congratulations, you have Microsoft Word 2007.  Excellent choice.  But, you have to share files with less evolved colleagues still using Word 2003 (or, gasp, an even earlier version).  The bad news is that while Microsoft has a free download that enables Office 2003 users to open Office 2007 files, you may experience some disruptions.  Microsoft’s compatibility checker sometimes refers to these issues with a message that includes the phrase ”you may experience some minor loss of fidelity”.  Well, minor is subjective - so here is a listing of issues (from Microsoft TechNet) that you should be aware of.

The next post will describe how to use Compatibility Mode when writing/editing in Word 2007 to proactively avoid these issues. 

Katriel 

My list of the 8 things that must be changed to make Microsoft Word really  productive for knowledge workers. 

1. Automated insertion of front matter.
2. Paste unformatted.
3. Automated settings for headings and footers.
4. Fast, reliable insertion of images and tables with captions.
5. Conditional text.
6. Style repair (e.g. when MyStyle becomes “MyStyle,2 point above,bold”).
7. Pre-flight check (for revision marks, broken cross-references, etc.)
8. Numbered lists.

The good news is that Author Max™ (an add-in for Word) does a pretty good job of handling issues 1-7. (We have a solution for issue 8 too, just not yet built-into Author Max.) What issues are most important to you?

Katriel

Finally.  Our top-secret add-in for Microsoft Word is live and posted on the web - Author Max. The 14-day trial is free.

We would love feedback on what it does — and what functionality you think we need to add. So far we have Conditional Text, Pre-flight check (looks for revision marks, unresolved cross references, etc.), paste unformatted, automatically insert figures and tables with appropriate captions, automatically set headers and footers, insert front matter, and more.

Looking forward to your feedback!
Katriel

One approach to “policies for working with Word” is rely on goodwill (or gentle arm-twisting – see Jawboning). Another approach, less common, is build-in compliance to the authoring/editing process.  My feeling is that once you have more than one or two people opening and editing documents compliance enforcement should be built-in and jawboning is unlikely to work.