Re: For your entertainment: sad tale of woe

From: Jay Freedman (jay.freedman_at_verizon.net)
Date: 01/14/05 

Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 14:13:01 -0500

OMG! You have my utmost sympathy. Before you dive in, take a deep breath,
step back a minute, and think about things.

Look over the unformatted material and compare it to the formatted chapters.
It *might* be quicker to transfer the changes into the formatted files than
to format the unformatted ones -- but take into account the likelihood of
transcription errors.

If you're ever tempted to work for these professors again, or anyone like
them, get a stipulation in your contract that you can charge a healthy
premium for boneheaded things like this. 

-- 
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP          FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
jg70124 wrote:
> 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.