The world, it conspires

[hrj]

I suppose I can't complain, in the grand scheme of things. I walked into the gym this morning to be greeted with a large sign "No hot water." Well. Given the choice between ending with a cold shower or going to work all sweaty I opted for moving the workout to after work. That was before I spent just short of 12 hours at work. Yes, it's the stupid interim report thing that I was working on at home yesterday. I spent all day harassing people for clarifications, additional details, non-corrupted copies of graphs, and OKs on rewordings. And it was one of those projects that just refuses to come to a good stopping place. I finally came home when I'd completed everything that could be done without the last two people getting back to me. And if one more person tells me that nobody cares about the report having consistent formatting, coherent structure, and a single consistent way of spelling the name of the central issue of the investigation ... well, if one more person tells me that I won't believe it any more than when the first person did. They'd care enough if I hadn't fixed it all up. (Who knew there were so many peculiar ways of incorporating tables and images into a Word file? My contributors seem to have tried all of them in turn.)

On the up side, I have discovered that Word is capable not only of numbering tables and figures sequentially with automatically-updating codes, but it is also capable of handling cross-reference codes to said tables and figures that also update automatically. This will be very useful when I take a look at the overall structure tomorrow and decide that the internal contents of the four main sections needs to be rearranged to be more parallel. (Said rearrangement will totally mess with my QA reviewer, who has already gotten started on a preliminary version.)

Thanksgiving vacation cannot come too soon. Fortunately, it's coming at a natural lull in the investigation.

And I've made absolutely no progress at lining up a date for the company gala dinner this coming Saturday. This is because I've made no actual inquiries on the topic. I'm planning to go, no matter what, but I'm likely to end up moping in a corner at this rate.

Comments

[kareina.livejournal.com]

It does you no good at all, as I'm on the wrong continent, but I'd go to the company dinner with you if A) I were there and B) you'd welcome my company.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

How do you get the auto-updating codes? I cannot help but think that would be very useful...

[gunnora.livejournal.com]

You use Insert>Cross-Reference.

TOCs can be made automatic by using a consistent style for the chapter/section headings, then use Insert>Index and Tables.

Table and figure numbering you handle in the style for the labels, usually, which uses the built-in numbering properties.

You can also force word to display an outline view (view>Outline), which is sometimes helpful in revisions.

Do watch out as that document gets huge though... Word is notoriously unstable with documents over 100 pages (which is why most technical writers use Adobe FrameMaker). To combat this, save frequently and use versioned files (change the filename to have "rev1.0" etc in them) so if one goes belly-up, you have a restore point.

I'm a Word guru/tech writer by trade, so feel free to ask if you need some Word wizardry.

[aastg.livejournal.com]

I totally agree with you about formatting. People don't think they care, but they do - at least to the extent that a crisply presented report has more visual credibility than one with sloppy or so-so formatting.