A whole weekend spent working on one document
Original article date: June 1998
A Whole Weekend!
That’s what I’ve just spent working on one document. I’d say a third of the time spent was because the document was started in one version of a ‘leading word processing program’ and then I attempted to work on it in another.
And this set me thinking. More and more we are hearing of standards (the STEP format, DXF files for drawings, HTML format documents for web pages), and yet the thing we actually do most ‘joint working’ with, formatted written text, is turning into more of a mire as time goes on.
When email first started, all you got was text. And everyone who had email could read it. Now, as almost everyone has MIME, people produce letters and memos in their company’s standard word processing format and attach them to emails, reducing the chances of the recipient having the right software to view it. Often they end up printing it, because they might at least have a ‘viewer’ that will permit this. In which case a fax would have been equally sensible.
Some naively think that by going for the ‘No 1′ word processing program they’re guaranteed to be able to cope. But when (as I have) you’ve been through the following, you wonder. Firstly I created a file in version n. I found consortium partner had the n-1 version of program. Oops.
I tried to save the document as n-1 format. The document was too big; it crashed. I saved the doc as n, and supplied the file to him with an import filter. The partner can now read n by adding the filter to his n-1 program.
Except the document is too big, and there isn’t enough memory. So the filter doesn’t actully work for our document.
I finally located a version of n for the partner to use. Not familiar with it, he lost hours and ended up furious. All the software in the above tale is from the same manufacturer, where n=97 and n-1= 6.
If several people are working together on a document and they don’t have precisely the same version of the same word processing program, there’s going to be heartache. Fact. So here are a few basic steps to reduce it.
1 Find out at the start what everyone uses. List everyone who might make input to the document. If you have a choice, settle for the lowest common denominator if it means everyone can work in the same program.
2 Agree some ground rules. If anyone is still on a platform like DOS with ‘8.3′ filename constraints (e.g ‘LETTER.TXT’), then everyone must work by that and stick to it. Insist on a scheme for distinguishing new versions from previous ones (last letter of the filename as a,b,c etc).
3 Insist on a central repository with everyone regularly sending versions in. Not everyone might have a good enough backup policy, and you can’t afford to find out at the end, but if there is a central store of saved work, you’re safe. It also means the ‘formatter’ can get a sneak preview of how bad it’s going to be.
4 If you can’t, try to minimise the inevitable reformatting. Accept that eventually, someone will have to tidy the whole lot up, and this should be someone with the most advanced of all the programs present.
5 Prior to the big tidy up, don’t go overboard with formatting – it will probably be junked. Send out a basic style guide so nobody creates something so alien it ruins the formatter’s life. If in doubt, stick to plain text, forget playing with fonts, keep tables separate in spreadsheets, and don’t use tabs, extra page breaks or blank lines to make the document pretty
6 Try to keep documents small. If parts of the document are going to different people, then make them separate documents until the very end. Don’t paste in digital images until you have to – they will make the document unwieldy to work on and awkward to transfer. Deal with them as separate files until you absolutely have to combine them.
7 Try to allow everyone to work in a program they’re familiar with! The time spent by a formatter tidying up someone’s work in a familar package at the end is nothing compared with the waste and stress of someone struggling with new menus, functions, bugs etc.
8 Don’t be techno-obsessive. If sending out a printed document that is a combination of spreadsheets and two different word processing programs is going to get the job done on time, then that must be better than insisting that somehow we’ll get every byte into the same program.
9 Get the content right first. Modern tools draw you in to playing with things to do with style instead of substance (Windows 98 is codenamed “Mandelson” apparently) and you simply have to resist the urge. Ask youself this simple question: “Did I get every last sentence finished before starting to play with the appearance?”
10 Finally, remember, typing something in from scratch is only so bad, and however bad, it is a bounded, quantifiable task. If a file transfer task gets really bad, don’t soldier on for the sake of it. It could take forever.
I’m about to standardise on a universal format unchanged by the years – Dictaphone tapes. And just hoping that my US client is using the same version of the standard.
June 1998