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I have to use a style guide and template where I work too. I break rules all
the time but i try to keep them small. My understanding is that certain
departures from the template can cause problems down the road when it comes
time to upload the documents (through another application) so that they can
be viewed remotely by employees all over the world. But, never having been
through the process of uploading myself I don't know exactly what the
dynamics of it all are (I will soon though, heaven help me).
If it's just a "look & feel" issue, inflexibility on minor variations seems
arbitrarily precise (especially when it was you that defined the template to
begin with). Despite the potential problems associated with departing from
our template, the folks who mandated / designed this in the first place (who
are Swiss and notoriously rigorous when it comes to rules) expect that each
writer may find cause to vary from the standard a bit.
What they did was to define exactly what fell into the catagory of
"required, not negotiable", and everything else is a recommendation but can
be changed. That has worked really well so far and I love the template
(since it saves tons of mind-numbing formatting time), but I'm still allowed
the freedom to make decisions and changes where i think it's appropriate.
My advice: discuss discuss discuss.
Good luck!
Jennfer
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Ellen wrote:
We have a style guide and a template. Our manager, who is the manager of
Customer Service and Support, becomes unhappy when we depart from the
template. I created the template. It is mostly for end user documentation,
and I always envisioned it as the "core" from which individual documents
might vary to some degree, depending on the needs of the writer. With some
variation allowed, documents would still have the same "look and feel" if
the writer adhered to the fonts and so forth.
Is it usual to consider a template the only way to create documents of the
same type, allowing the documentor no freedom depending on the individual
document?
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