It’s not going to be a good day. Yesterday was not a good day, so what makes me think that today won’t be, either? Because I’m already at work, and I know (not think) that it’s not going to get any better than it is as I go off on this rant.
We got the proposal documents 2 days late. I told them to keep track changed turned on. Well, I didn’t know that they would totally suck at that and delete entire sections and copy in replacements, while only changing a couple of lines here and there. Now there is no way to put change bars on just what actually changed without reading the entire friggin’ 350 page document word for word, thereby defeating the purpose of tracked changes entirely.
My best bet is to print this crap along with the last submission and compare them OR do a document compare with the last version with this one’s changes all accepted. That should reveal what actually changed between the two versions, not what “changed.”
Instead of going off on a “why can’t people do their simple jobs without sucking and making my job 10x harder, while they take home the bigger paycheck, better vacation package, and the house on the corner lot?” rants, I’m going to write my “I told you so” post about last night’s American Idol.
I suggest your office purchase a license of Workshare Deltaview. It is a stand-alone document comparison tool. It is more accurate than Word’s compare feature and also does PDF’s and other formats. I work at a law firm and we often get responses like the one you received. Deltaview solves the issue in 30 seconds.
Thanks, I’ll pass that on as a process improvement idea, though our IS department is very bloated and full of themselves. Change is very hard to come by here, partly because of our customers’ software limitations and security issues with using the latest software that is still buggy.
I’m rolling along pretty good now, using my own ingenious method. ๐
Hey man, you could always just use Writeboard (http://www.writeboard.com/). Copy and paste the original…save…and then copy and paste the new one…then save again. You can see the changes by comparing the two. Job done. ๐
Nice site, but I guarantee you I’d be arrested before I could say “But…” if I posted this document out on the Internet.
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Good resource for other people, though.
I have a solution, Tell them you need a 42 inch plasma as a computer screen and then you can see everything real big. you have to be real convincing though when you tell them that bigger is definitely better.