Re: For your entertainment: sad tale of woe

From: Richard Neville (roneville_at_sprintmail.com)
Date: 01/14/05 

Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 19:12:25 GMT

Not much you can do now, but next time make a backup copy regularly to
another medium, such as a CD, that temps and others can't mess with.

"jg70124" <jg70124@nospamyahoo.com> wrote in message
news:%23O5g6em%23EHA.1544@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...
> I've posted about my situation before, and got lots of good responses.
> Now,
> however, no responses are required - I am just posting to vent.
>
> I'm working on a book with two professors of marketing, both older, both
> significantly less skilled with their computers than they think they are.
> There are also a bunch of other people involved: a research assistant, an
> editor, a consultant, and the publisher. There are Macs and Windows
> machines, and Word versions from 97 to 2003.
>
> My job was to help the professors put their (disorganized) material in
> some
> sort of order, and to format the chapters (20) for the publisher. To do
> that, I put the material into an outline, created a style ***, removed
> all
> the character formatting, and applied the new styles. That took about 6
> weeks. I did it at the beginning of the process, and since no one else
> on
> the project had any understanding of styles, I became the de facto "keeper
> of the format". Which means that when ever anyone changed anything, they
> had to pass the material back to me to fix the format - I've been doing it
> for about 7 months now.
>
> Last week, the lead author made a bunch of last minute changes, so he gave
> me the chapters this morning and asked me to do a final sweep of the
> formatting. When I opened the first chapter, I discovered - much to my
> horror - that the styles were gone. The footnotes (100's per chapter) were
> disconnected. The captions and cross references were broken. The
> document
> was all character formatted.
>
> It turns out that at some point last fall, the lead author (who doesn't
> know
> styles) decided he didn't like the formatting (despite the fact that it
> was
> ordained by the publisher), so he hired a word processing temp to do a
> reformat. And it turns out she didn't understand Word styles either. So
> she converted all the materials in all the chapters to plain text, then
> applied character formatting. Since the author has been happily making
> changes to these plain text versions, we can't go back.
>
> So now I'm sitting here thinking about spending 3-4 weeks re-doing the
> formatting, rebuilding the footnotes, and recreating the tables.
>
> Lesson learned: for the next book (starting in a week or so), leave the
> thing in plain text until the last possible minute.
>
>