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John Posada [mailto:JPosada -at- book -dot- com] wondered:
> So, over the last 2-3 days, I've been going back through all
> my Framemaker
> tables and reimporting the data into an Excel table, then
> sorting, grouping,
> etc.
>
> What I found was that a substantial amount of data is either
> transposed,
> obsolete, missing, applied incorrectly, or not applied
> uniformly across the
> documentation. I can understand HOW it happens, you're
> rushed, you're giving
> erroneous information, you make stupid errors, names change in the
> application being written about but you either don't know,
> aren't told,
> don't realize the significance until too late.
[snip]
> So...my question. How many of you take the data from your
> documentation,
> massage it in a different application than what it was
> authored in, and if
> you do, what have you found?
My answer to the above, and to the other questions that I
snipped for space is... no, I don't.
I'm not really clear on how you are doing it, what forms
this information takes, how you are chunking and categorizing
it to fit into the everything is a table-entry format, etc.
I have some data in tables and lists (stuff like supported
algorithms, compatibility matrices, viewable/settable system
capabilities and policies... But much of it is not in that
form. Much of it is procedures and explanations of why you'd
want to perform a given procedure, where it fits into the
greater scheme of things, what the options are, and why... and
like that.
It might be worth my while to do what you're suggesting, but
I don't quite have a handle on it, from your brief description.
Actually, it looked like a recognition description -- if you
recognize this, meaning that you are already doing it, say yes.
For those of us who don't/aren't... say on, sir! Say on! :-)
/kevin
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