260 page WORD '07 doc would not open--some kind of XML error messa

[Margaret]

It was my first week in a new Tech Writing job at a large consulting firm.
I was given a 260+ page Operational Manual that 4 prior authors had worked
on. Some had very limited knowledge of WORD.
I spend 3 days making edits and , of course, saving it each night.
On my fourth day coming to work, I was not able to open the document.
The IT Dept researched it and said it could only be retrieved by someone who
'knew XML'. They had no one and I don't know XML.
I happened to explain this to an admin asst.
She said I ought to send the doc to her. I did. She saved it as a 97-2003
ver and then it opened up ( at least this is what she told me, I didn't see
what she did).
But, WORD is not downward compatible, so formatting got screwed up.
My boss was convinced that the formatting was SO screwed up that I needed to
go back and start all over editing the original doc before any of my
editing...
Since I don't wish to have this happen again, what are the lessons learned
here?
Meaning, are these kinds of things common w/ WORD 07?
How badly was the formatting altered and how likely would I have been able
to reinstate/reformat the 'saved in 2003' version?
This document has a lot of hyperlinks to websites, embedded VISIO flow
charts, an index, TOC, etc.
ALso, the prior 'tech writer' made a TOC by making a bookmark out of each
heading in the TOC and NOT doing it using the right styles for creating a TOC
using the built in WORD TOC feature. I 've never seen someone do a TOC this
way.
Is there some sane reason someone can explain to me why that would have been
done?
THanks!

 

[Yves Dhondt]

It was my first week in a new Tech Writing job at a large consulting firm.
I was given a 260+ page Operational Manual that 4 prior authors had worked
on. Some had very limited knowledge of WORD.
I spend 3 days making edits and , of course, saving it each night.
On my fourth day coming to work, I was not able to open the document.
The IT Dept researched it and said it could only be retrieved by someone
who
'knew XML'. They had no one and I don't know XML.

Most modern applications tend to store settings and/or data in xml nowadays.
So it seems highly unlikely that nobody knows xml in the entire IT
department.

I happened to explain this to an admin asst.
She said I ought to send the doc to her. I did. She saved it as a 97-2003
ver and then it opened up ( at least this is what she told me, I didn't
see
what she did).
But, WORD is not downward compatible, so formatting got screwed up.

That sounds odd. Unless you would be talking about new features like
equations, citations, ... the Word 2007 xml model (open xml) is pretty much
the same as the Word 2003 one.

My boss was convinced that the formatting was SO screwed up that I needed
to
go back and start all over editing the original doc before any of my
editing...
Since I don't wish to have this happen again, what are the lessons learned
here?

You should always have a backup which you verified. Depending on your OS
version and the available disc space, the 'shadow copies' functionality
might be interesting to you.

Meaning, are these kinds of things common w/ WORD 07?

They tend to occur more if you are saving things on a network or external
drive rather than your hard drive.

How badly was the formatting altered and how likely would I have been able
to reinstate/reformat the 'saved in 2003' version?

Word 2007 does use a new format, so it seems logical that there are some
more errors than in the old format but the chance to hit one should be only
marginally larger.

You could try opening the document with Open Office as it has slightly
better recovering capabilities.

Alternatively, look for someone with decent xml knowledge. They might be
able to just remove a couple of items from the xml source of your document
(e.g. a single chart, or some malformatted text) to get all the other things
working again.

This document has a lot of hyperlinks to websites, embedded VISIO flow
charts, an index, TOC, etc.
ALso, the prior 'tech writer' made a TOC by making a bookmark out of each
heading in the TOC and NOT doing it using the right styles for creating a
TOC
using the built in WORD TOC feature. I 've never seen someone do a TOC
this
way.
Is there some sane reason someone can explain to me why that would have
been
done?

You might understand this better if you know how a TOC works. When you
insert a TOC, it starts looking for the necessary entries through your text.
To each entry, it adds a bookmark. Commonly the name of the bookmark is in
the format _Toc<UniqueNr>. The actual table of contents then just contains
links to those bookmarks. So basically the original author did the work of
the TOC functionality by hand.

Is there a good reason to do so? Well, if you don't stick to styles and
headings, it is the easiest way to not get a messy TOC containing all sorts
of entries.

THanks!

Yves