Is Word Formatting in End-User docs important? [was:Word Help (pr oblem solved)]

[Paul Hanson <PHanson -at- Quintrex -dot- com>]

Jo and Sharon, 

My esteemed collegues, I want to make a distinction. 

There is a difference in receiving a poorly-formatted resume Word doc
(with all the sins Jo and Sharon have mentioned) and a difference in
distributing a PDF created from a poorly-formatted end-user Word
document. I am talking about the second instance. I fully agree that an
applicant using Word should know what they're doing or send a PDF
resume.

In the 2nd case though, if the document is useful, I don't care how it's
formatted. Case in point, the legacy Word docs here are horrendous. The
people that wrote them:

manually created a TOC in alphabetical order, 
used empty paragraph marks to get text to the next page, 
manually typed in TOC page numbers when something changed, 
used "Normal" style and applied character formatting, 
changed the header for each new section of the document (some of the
Word docs are 20 pages and have 20 section breaks), 
cut and pasted images that float all over when you make a small change, 
pasted big images into the HEADER of a document 
and there's many more I can't think of. 

The information in these docs, though, was up-to-date when they were
originally sent out. I used to think like you did, and think, "What a
frickin' mess of a document!" but now, I think, "What a frickin' mess of
a document, but it works."

And yes, I am helping the people that wrote them learn more about Word.
They were given Word 97, told what subject needed to be covered, and
wrote.

Paul

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Jo Francis Byrd [SMTP:jbyrd -at- byrdwrites -dot- com]
> I've seen too many times when bad formatting messed up a document to
> want to deal with anyone who doesn't have adequate knowledge of the
> tools. Or, at least, a willingness to learn.
> 
	and Sharon wrote:
> I HATE seeing spaces and paragraph marks all over documents that cross
> my computer. 

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