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The discussion of bad formatting in Word makes me smile, because I'm dealing
with that kind of work in this job. I handle documents from the QA group,
and they have a history (still being written today, sigh) of using hard
returns and tabs instead of the formatting available in the styles.
Yesterday I started on a 12-page nightmare with my new manager, and I had
him crouching in my cubicle while I explained the most basic aspects of
setting indents, etc. By the end of the day we had a good document, but it
left me wondering how I can diplomatically clean up work that is, frankly,
poor, without seeming to insult the authors.
I'm making changes that would be obvious to most of us here, but to these
users it seems overly fancy - why bother when you can just make it "look
right" and send it out the door? Some of these people refuse to use the
Show/Hide feature, so they never even know what phantoms and goblins are
hiding among the text.
One thing, though - for my portfolio, I sometimes save these docs in
"before" and "after" versions. Heh heh heh.
- A
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