J
jg70124
I have been working with a university professor on a marketing text book
made up of 20 chapters, each about 100 pages long. Originally, he created
the entire thing on his Mac using character formatting, hard returns, and
spaces instead of tabs. I spent a couple of weeks reformatting using styles
(we have about 30 styles to cover all the situations). Although I was never
able to teach him to use styles, it was ok, because it only took a few
minutes for me to reformat his changes after each iteration.
Now, however, the publisher has hired a freelance editor and a marketing
consultant, both of whom are contributing new material and editing existing
material. Strangely, none of these new users (publisher, editor,
consultant) understands styles - in fact, it turns out they don't even know
styles exist. Nor do they know about the collaboration aids in Word, or
about bullets, or about automatic caption, or self-updating fields.
So when one of these new people wants to change a figure number, for
instance, they delete the caption including the figure number field I
inserted, and type in a new line, using whatever style was in the previous
paragraph. Then they manually reformat the caption to make it look like
they want.
As a result, the process of managing the formats has become much more
difficult.
Additionally, I've used Word's equation editor to create equations
throughout the text, but somewhere (at the Mac?) the equations are getting
crushed; when the documents come back to me, they've been replaced with
error codes and grey boxes.
The final product must be more or less "camera ready" - the publisher will
reset the text using something other than Word, and so they don't care about
styles, formats, or any of that. They just want it to look like how we want
it. In fact, they would be happier if we just did the whole thing in plain
text, and used ASCII codes at the beginning of each 'graph to say how we
want that one formatted.
Given how complex Word is, and how few people really understand how to use
it, my guess is that other people here have faced similar situations. (For
instance, Sandra Jensen has posted a similar request just a few days ago).
So I would very much appreciated any process management advise people can
give.
Thanks,
jeremy
made up of 20 chapters, each about 100 pages long. Originally, he created
the entire thing on his Mac using character formatting, hard returns, and
spaces instead of tabs. I spent a couple of weeks reformatting using styles
(we have about 30 styles to cover all the situations). Although I was never
able to teach him to use styles, it was ok, because it only took a few
minutes for me to reformat his changes after each iteration.
Now, however, the publisher has hired a freelance editor and a marketing
consultant, both of whom are contributing new material and editing existing
material. Strangely, none of these new users (publisher, editor,
consultant) understands styles - in fact, it turns out they don't even know
styles exist. Nor do they know about the collaboration aids in Word, or
about bullets, or about automatic caption, or self-updating fields.
So when one of these new people wants to change a figure number, for
instance, they delete the caption including the figure number field I
inserted, and type in a new line, using whatever style was in the previous
paragraph. Then they manually reformat the caption to make it look like
they want.
As a result, the process of managing the formats has become much more
difficult.
Additionally, I've used Word's equation editor to create equations
throughout the text, but somewhere (at the Mac?) the equations are getting
crushed; when the documents come back to me, they've been replaced with
error codes and grey boxes.
The final product must be more or less "camera ready" - the publisher will
reset the text using something other than Word, and so they don't care about
styles, formats, or any of that. They just want it to look like how we want
it. In fact, they would be happier if we just did the whole thing in plain
text, and used ASCII codes at the beginning of each 'graph to say how we
want that one formatted.
Given how complex Word is, and how few people really understand how to use
it, my guess is that other people here have faced similar situations. (For
instance, Sandra Jensen has posted a similar request just a few days ago).
So I would very much appreciated any process management advise people can
give.
Thanks,
jeremy