RE: Documentation Sanity Check

Subject: RE: Documentation Sanity Check
From: "Robert Plamondon" <robert -at- plamondon -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 10:39:56 -0700


John:

Thanks for the kind words.

I spent a lot of time banging my head against the wall making it so that the
master table could be linked to the document, so no actual insertion was
needed. The idea was that I'd have the actual master table on the first
sheet in Excel, and additional sheets for each derived table. Alas, both
Excel and Frame are far too weak to support such a simple concept. Excel
doesn't auto-sort, as far as I can tell, in the derivative tables, and Frame
is very weak at importing data without wreaking havoc on the formatting.

Autofilter is a great tool, but I like having derived tables on separate
sheets. It's a form of self-documentation about what each table is supposed
to look like. Also, if (god forbid) you have to override values from the
master, that's the place to do it.

I suppose I could write awk scripts (I've never gotten around to learning
perl) and have a Makefile (in fact, this has some real advantages), but only
when I'm the sole person who ever touches the document, which is generally
not what my clients want.

-- Robert

P.S. 5500 rows! I think I've passed 500 a couple of times, but not often.

--
Robert Plamondon
President, High-Tech Technical Writing
robert -at- plamondon -dot- com
http://www.plamondon.com/HIGHTECH/homepage.html
"We're Looking for a Few Good Clients"



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References:
RE: Documentation Sanity Check: From: John Posada

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