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| Naked Wolverine Wrestling or another round with MS Word bullets? |
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| Written by Peter Fournier | |
| Sunday, 09 October 2005 | |
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OK, so the title sounds exagerated, but haven't we all felt that maybe, just maybe, a word processing program should be able to handle bulleting and numbering in a nice, predictable, fixable way? How many technical writers, students, or just plain writers have worked 18 hours straight, been hours away from a deadline and then done the bad thing, the "thing that one should never do" with a list in a Microsoft Word document. That might be as simple as copying and pasting text with a list from one document to another. It could be as simple as indenting a list item. Suddenly, ALL of the bulleting and numbering in your 200 page document is corrupted, gone insane, convinced that what you really wanted your headings to say was "A.22" for every single blessed one of them. That's when naked wolverine1 wrestling (NWW) sounds good, way better than trying to convince yourself you are using a professional product. (1)See the bottom of this page for more information on wolverines. Of course you can also mess up numbering in an OpenOffice or StarOffice document. Anything a user can mess around with, a user can break. The interesting thing from a professional writer point of view is this: in OpenOffice and StarOffice the damage to bulleting and numbering is contained, like it is in truly professional writing programs like XMetal, AborText and FrameMaker. You do not lose the document. You lose a list, or in an extended list (one with normal paragraphs between numbered list items) in a section. And no, I don't mean you lose content, you just lose correct bulleting and numbering in a short section of the document. When the technical press babbles on about ROI, they don't take into account factors like list behavior in a program. I guess that's why Microsoft never fixed the problem -- fixing their list behavior never had a positive impact on their own ROI or profitability. Driving the user crazy with frustration and missing deadlines doesn't show up in Harvard Business School calculations. So, when reading comparisons between StarOffice, OpenOffice and Microsoft Word try to take into account your own experience and ask yourself: have I ever felt that NWW (naked wolverine wrestling) would be better than wrestling a Word document into shape? If you have put that into the scale. I've been using OpenOffice and StarOffice since 2001 and never achieved the same level of insane frustration I reach regularly with MS Word. On the other hand, some OpenSource programs can be a real challenge. Frequent freneticism was my natural state while doing this job (Domestic-Church.Com Store) with an OpenSource shopping system called ZenCart. But, and it's a big but, while the learning curve on ZenCart was a beast, in the end it worked, it made sense, and it's maintainable -- source code changes and all. Till later, Peter Fournier Why not support a wolverine study or conservation project? Go to the Wolverine Research page at the Wolverine Foundation: http://www.wolverinefoundation.org/research/research.htm to catch up on all the news you've missed and maybe make a donnation. You're a tech writer, you're rich, you can afford it ! |
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