Hi Ronald:
I may be prejudiced, as I was a beta-tester for EndNote-8, but unlike
Word, I've found EndNote to be reliable and predictable in its behavior.
If you had been a beta tester for Word (as I am...) you would know that Word
is also reliable and predictable. But I hear this complaint often enough to
make it worth spending time on a detailed answer.
I should also add, right up front, that I did not "always" believe that Word
was anything other than a creation of the antichrist, sent here to make my
life a misery. It is very amusing to people who have been around here for a
couple of decades to see how McGhie has changed his tune over the years
When I first came here, it was to vituperatively criticise Microsoft, it's
software, it's staff, and all of the various horses they rode in on
I
am very fortunate that Google withdrew its news database from that period:
Back then, I was certainly not known for my balanced and reasoned discourse!
Ronald, your postings are far more sensible than mine were back then
Of course, Ronald would readily understand that "writing books" is not a
simple task. It's worth repeating here, because many people who have
problems with Word do not understand that "a book" is not simply "a long
piece of text". It's a really complex interrelated structure of components.
And there is a great deal of professional knowledge and skill required to
reliably create one. Let's explore this:
The old-fashioned way of creating books and long documents (think
"encyclopaedias") was to have a large number of highly-trained specialists,
each doing a "piece" of the work.
The author would write the manuscript in longhand with a pencil. The typist
would type it out. The editor would verify the facts and fix it up. The
researcher would insert the footnotes and attributions. The Author would
approve the finished result (often, there would be several rounds of this).
Then the typesetter would set the type. The layout editor would insert the
pictures. The platemaker would make the printing plates. Finally, the
printer would print the book. These people were all different, expensive,
highly-trained professionals. In today's prices, the first copy of a
500-page book would cost you maybe half-a-million bucks.
Today, the author "can" do everything. If they use Word, they will get the
first copy off the press for under $50,000. If they really know how to use
all of the power tools built into Word for the purpose, and use each one
fully, precisely, and appropriately. If they don't know professional
publishing in the first place, what they are most likely to get is an
expensive mess.
Word is a "power tool". It's the most powerful word processor on the
market. Power tools are a great advance for human kind -- in the hands of
someone who knows what they are doing. In the hands of a learner, a power
tool can, unfortunately, enable them to create a bigger mistake faster.
Word has three layers of tools and techniques built into it. One for its
designed market, the home user, end-user, corporate user. One for the
professional user and long document specialists such as yourself. And one
for the application developers and solution designers such as myself.
Because Word was designed for people who do not know how to use
word-processors, the latter two levels of tools are not easy to find in the
Help. The help assumes that people who need help with Word do not know
high-complexity word-processing well, and probably never will be asked to
write a complex academic book with all of the bells and whistles.
So the first solution the help offers to any problem is likely to be the
solution most appropriate to people creating very simple documents with zero
design, planning or editing.
People who know professional publishing don't have problems with this.
Because they already know what to do, they simply use the Search function in
Word Help to find what they need. The help will then take them straight to
the "Industrial Strength" tools, which are otherwise not immediately
apparent.
People who don't know professional publishing are invited to hang around in
places like this, and ask their questions before they write their document.
Of course, we don't know what we don't know until after it blows up in our
face, so that is not 100 per cent solution. But it's the best we have for
helping people whose purchase of a power tool has allowed them to attempt to
do things they don't (yet) know how to do.
Word enables me to create documents of thousands of pages, and to have them
stable and predictable while being edited every day for years. That's what
I have been doing for a living, these past ten years. Before then, I was a
newspaper journalist and technical specialist. People who do not know how
to use Word very well can damage such a document beyond repair in less than
a month. If you hang around in here, we can show you how to do the former.
However, you may decide to stop blaming Word for results produced through
not knowing how to use it: it's not actually the quickest way for us to get
there
It has quirks, like using "plain quotation" marks around items that
should have proper quotation marks, but the quirks are documented and
consistent. We discovered lots of little problems during the
beta-testing, including a few show-stoppers. To their credit, the
EndNote people fixed every problem, went to a few extra rounds of
testing, and were willing to delay release to get it right. I wish I
could say the same about Microsoft.
Well, if you "had" been on the betas for Word, you might well be able to say
that
Then again, you might also find yourself wishing, as I do, that
they had fixed various things you wanted fixed. Word is a very much larger
piece of code than EndNote. Far more complex. I really believe that they
fixed everything they could "afford" to fix before they shipped. But yes,
there were a "lot" of trade-offs of features, functionality, bug fixes,
release date, and price.
Every substantial piece of software that has ever been made has been shipped
with known bugs. Apple OS X and Mac OS are no exception: and neither is
Word. Any fool with a compiler can make software -- making a profit selling
it is much more of a challenge. A sad fact of human endeavour is that
perfect software costs an infinite amount of money and takes an infinite
amount of time to make. If you want a copy of Word we can all afford, to be
on sale this year, something has to give. As with any other development
team, Microsoft took a gamble with Word 2004 that the remaining bugs they
knew about but didn't have the time or money to fix would not hurt very any
real-world users, and would not hurt many users badly. Experience on this
group tells me they came pretty close.
For what it is worth, I would not use Word if it weren't for the
convenience of EndNote. As a book-writing tool Word sucks!
I'm not sure why you say that. As a person who has been writing books for a
living for the past 20 years, I happen to believe that Word is the bets
there is, by a very long way. If you were to allow me to explain the
techniques I use, I think you would eventually come someway towards that
belief yourself.
Personally, I increase my quotes by 50 to 100 per cent if I am required to
use anything "other" than Word. Over the years, I have come to know Word,
and trust it, to the point where when time is "my" money, I won't bet my
business on any other product. Yes, I do indeed have WordPerfect and
FrameMaker and WordPro sitting here in case I need to use them. I maintain
current skills in all of them, just in case. But none of them have the kind
of power I need to make a profit in today's technical writing market.
not for the "Word format only" demands of trade publishers I'd go back
to LyX and LaTeX in a heartbeat.
Yeah. Word is an object-oriented, paragraph-based, property-driven
application. LaTeX is to an extent a character-based command-stream driven
application. Making the transition can be very difficult. One of the keys
is to think of a Word paragraph as a LaTeX "macro". The "text" is only a
small part of what is going on in there.
EndNote, on the other hand, offers
conveniences and features that I never found in the various BibTeX tools
I used with LyX and LaTeX.
Yeah, EndNote is a very good product, no question. However, we should be
aware that EndNote is actually sitting outside Word and artificially
"injecting" content into Word objects that were never designed to hold so
much text or such complex structures. As soon as you include EndNote tags
in a document, you need to edit very carefully or you will indeed trash the
document's internal structure.
There are quite a few changes in tools and methods that are advisable if you
are producing long, complex documents. Then again, there are a few things
you wouldn't want to try (or can't do...) in LaTeX too...
Hope this helps
--
Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie <
[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410
