Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Two things this week that made my general day-to-day activities a bit different.

First, a friend in the US put me in touch with an author of a book on some software I use (was Macromedia’s Captivate; now owned by Adobe). The author wanted someone to co-write the update for v2 of this software (due out next month?), but unfortunately, after some to-ing and fro-ing via IM, I had to decline as the time frame was way too short. If I wasn’t already committed to 40 hours/week with existing contracts, I would’ve jumped at the chance. Not many dollars in writing books, but kudos can come in other ways! Maybe next time… (thanks Char!)

Second, I was asked to speak about my one-person business to a small group of undergrad students at Curtin Business School who are studying stuff on entrepreneurship. That was pretty neat and they asked some insightful questions. Thanks, Alicia.

A week or so ago I received the feedback from the evaluation forms submitted by attendees at my session at the 2006 WritersUA Conference in Palm Springs. Considering there were about 50 speakers – many of whom are world-renowned in our field – I did good!

My average scores for this session (where 5 is the BEST), and my ranking against all speakers over all sessions were:

• Presentation Skills 4.64; rank: 14th
• Subject Knowledge 4.95; rank: 4th
• Quality of Session Information 4.77; rank: 5th
• Quality of Session Slides/Handouts 4.55; rank: 12th

Evaluations from the AODC Conference are here…

I was having a discussion yesterday with some work colleagues about how Microsoft Word wants to think for you, and unexpectedly does things you don’t want it to do – like rearrange the indentation on auto bullets and numbering. And the cost of this “bug” to employee and employers alike.

Word is fairly ubiquitous throughout the business environment. Why? Because it makes it very easy for complete novices to create a document.

But that same ‘ease of use’ is also Word’s downfall, and what makes it so productivity-sapping.

As an example, I was talking with a prospective client last week. The CEO of this small company told me that he’d spent a week writing their new 74-page business plan… and TWO weeks reformatting it and fighting Word to get it to all look good. That’s two weeks of a CEO’s time (…and why they’d asked me in to help them!). Put an hourly rate on that two weeks for that person and you’ve got a lot of money wasted just because Word wants to take control of your document.

Of course, Word makes a lot of things easy for the novice – such as the auto bullets and numbering mentioned earlier. But just these two things are hidden with dangers that novice users don’t know about or understand. And these dangers cause them untold grief, a lot of wasted time, and huge amounts of frustration. Add to the mix the default “Match formatting” option, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Especially as Word doesn’t enforce the use of styles, which means that most of the world creates documents that are “Normal” with manually-applied character formatting.

If you tried to do the sums on what it costs the business world every day for people to fight Word into submission (a valiant but unwinnable cause), you’d come up with a staggering sum of money – enough to run a small country for a few years, I’d guess. EVERY DAY.

If Microsoft spent only a small fraction of Bill’s billions on fixing the frustrations in Word, they’d have happier customers who would be much less likely to bad mouth them. Ordinary Joe Bloggs in an ordinary office probably couldn’t give two hoots about Windows security (though the tech community gets pretty agitated about it) – they just want Word to work!

BTW, I gave up fighting Word a few years back. I rarely use it to create personal documents any more, and never use it for client work. Instead, I use AuthorIT and publish my paper-based documents to Word. The styles work, the bullets and numbers work, the Table of Contents works, etc. and I don’t have to deal with Word on a daily basis. Once I’ve set up my Word template, that’s it – I’m done!

I had a pleasant surprise in the Inbox today – my evaluations from the presentation I did at the AODC Conference in Cairns early last month. This was my first time presenting at this conference, so I was very pleased with the results and with my ranking as 3rd highest ranked speaker at the entire conference!

Here’s what I got (each score is an average out of 5, where 5 is “Outstanding”):

• Speaker Skills 4.8
• Speaker Knowledge 4.8
• Quality of Content 4.8
• Delegate interest in topic 4.7

Some of the written comments for this session (all unsolicited):

• “Wonderful”
• “I hadn’t thought I was interested, but it had heaps of useful info, so I’m glad I didn’t choose this session for a break”
• “Spoke a bit fast. Great content”
• “A great coverage of a lot of useful tools”
• “A lot of content in time, but wouldn’t want it longer”
• “Great practical session”
• “Would have liked more demo stuff”
• “Very useful review and tools”
• “Great session. Not teaching us to suck eggs. Useful resources.”

It was hard going back to work today. After 5 weeks away from the normal day-to-day, slipping back in was relatively easy, but my head wandered off occasionally to what we were doing ‘this time last week’… which was swimming with the fishies out on the Great Barrier Reef!

And after two conferences where I ‘swam with my own kind’, coming back to the normal world was a bit of a let-down. At conferences I get to discuss all sorts of things with like-minded colleagues from around the world – and they understand the issues without the level of detailed explanation required by the rest of humanity. One example that springs to mind was the editing mark-ups made on the sample menu provided by the hotel where we had the Trivia Night last Thursday. No-one else would’ve understood, but we all understood perfectly how a plural that is turned into a possessive gets up our collective noses! (The menu had possessive “Pasta’s” and “tomato’s” when it should have used the plural “Pasta” and “tomatoes”; and “corriander” for “coriander”, and other spelling errors too numerous to remember. Shudder.)

Ah well. I’ll work on the “work to save for the next trip away” scenario and get back into work mode all too soon and the memories of the trip will become distant ones.

Last day of the conference today. I’m sitting in Cairns Airport writing this at 9:45pm, so my memory will have to suffice for the list of today’s sessions as the conference handbook is in the checked luggage.

• Vendor promo of the Elkera XML software (Peter Meyer, Elkera)
• Brief presentation on single sourcing (Matthew Armstrong, AuthorIT)
• My presentation on Reviewing screen-based content – I received some wonderful comments from people afterwards, and on and off throughout the day, so I guess it went over well! One person told me she’d given me 6 out of a possible 5 on at least one aspect of my presentation.
• XML Data Islands (Dave Gash)
• CSS presentation (Dr Tom James)
• Presentation on Wikis, Blogs, RSS, Podcasts and other cool stuff (Tony Self)
• Case study about usability testing of PDF indexes versus full-text search (Carol Barnum)

There were a few sore heads this morning after last night’s Trivia Night… seems some people kicked on for a while afterwards.

After the last session, Tony thanked us all, then Gerry thanked Penny for a great job done in organising another successful conference; those who didn’t have immediate flights to catch adjourned to the adjacent bar for some farewell drinks. It was a great conference, with some terrific people in attendance.

Our flight back to Perth leaves at 10:30pm, getting in at the ungodly hour of 1:30am tomorrow. So it’s been a long day, and it will be another 6+ hours before we get in to our own bed. Our 5 weeks away is almost at an end… It’ll be hard going back to work…