[Ricki Miles]

Thank you so much for your valuable advice!

Ricki

"Robert M. Franz (RMF)" wrote in message
...
Hello Ricki

Ricki Miles wrote:
I am using Word XP and need to maintain several manuals ("Emergency
Preparedness Plans" and "Operation, Maintenance and Surveillance"
manuals) for generating stations.
There are essentially two levels of updates: simple and comprehensive.
The simple updates cover changes to names and contact info, org charts,
and responsibilities and these can be (should be) carried out at least
annually. The more comprehensive updates involve more significant
revisions to and rewriting of the text and take a fair bit more time to
complete. The pages all have a date of when the manual was issued in the
footer. The manuals have a log or revision record in the appendices to
track changes.

You might want to read up what John McGhie writes in the following article
(you might want to read up the whole article, in fact):

Creating a Template (Part II, by John McGhie)
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customizat...platePart2.htm

quote
Look up Longford Disaster, Esso and Melbourne on the web and read all
about how Exxon (Esso’s parent company) managed to send a thousand million
dollars and several of their staff up in a puff of smoke doing this.
/quote

If your manual is really about "Emergency", then don't even consider going
the "page" way. Users hate to complete manuals with their respective
correction pages, usually don't do it at all, and will more likely sit in
front of an outdated manual once the alarm bell is starting to ring.

[Even the Swiss Army stopped handing out correction pages; these consisted
of paragraphs which you had to cut out and glue over the old sections --
and that was for bookkeeping manuals! -- Actually, it was a good excercise
having to do this because then you had at least seen every updated rule
:-)]


What is a reasonable process for making minor updates (i.e., replace only
a few pages of the manual) so that we don't have to reprint the entire
manual every time a revision is made? I would think that the revised
pages having the new date of revision in the footer, replace the old
page, and that those pages are identified in the revision log. The title
page (cover page) also contains a date that would need to be updated. How
do you minimize confusion when some of the pages in the manual have
differing dates from one another and from the title page? What about the
major revisions?
[..]

If you really have to work page-oriented like this, consider using another
product. Word is notoriously bad at this sort of task: it's used to laying
out all content anew each time you look away, in any case each time you
delete a paragraph or even a word. Even though it has become better with
each version (if the right compatibility options is set), it is even worse
when you try switching printer (drivers); so, if you cannot guarantee to
always use the same printer throughout the lifetime of your document
(something which you normally cannot do at all), don't try it with Word:
you would be forced to treat each page as a separate section, possibly.
You then loose all the benefit of a word processor.

I suggest reprints in whole. With a writer's section at the start or end
indicating all changes of each revision, going back a couple of years


The manuals are also provided on a company intranet. Should the
electronic manual be identical (with respect to varying dates in the
footers) as the hard copy?

In what form: HTML, PDF, ...? You don't have a footer in HTML (at least
not comparable to a paper footer).

2cents
Robert
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