MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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I am writing a report that documents an ongoing project. It consists of text and figures from various sources. Doing it in Word is a pain in the ass, mostly becasue as I edit it, the figures move about, need to be edited ,resized etc, and the structure of the document changes. Also it needs to be available for others to work on.
I guess I am not the first person in the world to have this problem, so I wonder what tools and techniques people use who do it properly?
Thanks for any advice!!
styles anf formatting in word. do it before writing and it becomes easy.
Define your document styles and construction before writing/drawing. Does the project not have some existing docs you can use as a template?
Avoid Word's built-in drawing tools and embed Powerpoint slides instead (Insert->Object). The drawing tools are better and you can easily use the drawing in a presentation.
[i]I guess I am not the first person in the world to have this problem, so I wonder what tools and techniques people use who do it properly?[/i]
Employ someone who can do the job in the first place? 🙄
If you do use Word, make sure you use cross-references to refer to chapter titles, figures etc. Then if you insert new chapters, move them around or whatever they will update automatically.
styles anf formatting in word. do it before writing and it becomes easy.
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If you do use Word, make sure you use cross-references to refer to chapter titles, figures etc. Then if you insert new chapters, move them around or whatever they will update automatically.
Life becomes much easier once you have this sorted.
If there is still writing to be done, then just format all figures to be in line with the text to stop them moving around. Once the written content is complete, you can then experiment with the figure formatting to make the document look nicer.
If you work out how to integrate writing a word document with others (in a seamless fashion) then please let me know!
If you work out how to integrate writing a word document with others (in a seamless fashion) then please let me know!
Easy - one author in the UK, one in Australia 😉
so I wonder what tools and techniques people use who do it properly?
Latex with the source in a version control system is the best way I've done this.
However, at my current place of work it's all word docs, tracking changes, and there's a "merge changes from different authors" button in word 2010 on.
Also there's a way to lock the styles before you paste, which helps [i]loads[/i].
This:
void Word's built-in drawing tools and embed Powerpoint slides instead
Is also a good pro-tip.
If multiple people are working on it, then the master document mode feature is useful. Faff to set up and get going the first time, but if each person works on allocated chapters (which are in separate files) then it does work. Need to sort out cross references etc. properly then when all the chapters are imported it all works out. (NB I've not used this for some time, so might have changed a bit in the meantime)
Biggest PITA for me is when it's a single doc and you get reviews from several sources, and some add stuff in line and someone else works on what they think is the latest copy but isn't, so things go missing.
For simple, non-confidential stuff, Google docs is handy. But it's spooky seeing multiple cursors and multiple insertion. Not played with office 365, which I think lets you do similar?