[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Robert:

Ooops... I'm going blind :-) I didn't see that you had already answered it
:-)

Cheers


On 9/7/06 4:38 AM, in article , "Robert M.
Franz (RMF)" wrote:

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 (Esso¹s 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likely sit in front of an outdated manual once the alarm bell is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

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410