The other day, I was making final revisions to a group of Microsoft Word documents that were needed for an imminent product release. I placed an updated version of a document on our document management system and sent a link to my manager for him to review it. In the copy he opened every single cross reference, including the Table of Contents, had been replaced by Word’s “Error! Bookmark not defined” message. Embarrassing for me? Yes. Time consuming to fix? Yes. Completely unexpected? Definitely not.
I had to reinsert each cross-reference and then rebuild the TOC, which had decided to lose all the formatting from styles TOC1 and TOC2 as well. Not a difficult thing to do, but I felt it just shouldn’t have been necessary. When I sent the repaired document to my manager I commented that:
There is, apparently, an immutable law that dictates that the more urgently a document is needed the more likely it is to go completely haywire in Microsoft Word.
I thought that remark summed up my personal experience with Microsoft Word quite well: in its own technological variation of Murphy’s Law, it goes wrong at the worst possible time.
Later that day, I posted a variation of my remark to Twitter as:
The more urgently a document is needed, the more likely it is to go completely haywire in Microsoft Word
I thought I might make an attempt to grab my 15 minutes of fame by naming this adage with a twitter hashtag. With uncalled-for immodesty, I named it Farbey’s Law (#farbey’s_law). As I thought that some of my technical writing colleagues might find it amusing, I added the Technical Communications hashtag as well (#techcomm). Some of them recognised a familiar situation, and kindly re-tweeted my message to their followers. (You can see the original tweet on Twitter. If you’re on Twitter yourself you might like to Re-tweet it too.)
Even though Farbey’s Law was coined because of an incident with Microsoft Word, and indeed mentions Microsoft Word, it is not intended as a comment on the infamous “FrameMaker vs. Word” debate, nor as a comment on the difficulties of using Microsoft Word successfully in a corporate tech comms team (which deserves a blog article all to itself). It is simply a statement about the likelihood of bad stuff happening at the least welcome moment, and how real or imagined workplace pressure seems to make things go wrong at bad times more frequently.
Old age: That stage in life when you move from being a law breaker to a law maker
Well David. You did achieve a kind of fame as I have quoted your tweet in an article I have written for the Spring 2010 Edition of the ISTC’s Communicator journal. It certainly made me smile. See you at the London Tech Writers social BTW.
Hi David,
It could be worse.
We sent a doc out many years ago with a reference to the IT Mange instead of IT Manager.
Ivan
Ha ha, been there, done that! I loved the story, David! I tweeted it and retweeted your tweet too, just because I can.
BTW, I’ve never before noticed the “DF” pencil in your picture at top right. Is it new? Awesome!
Cheers, Sarah
Thanks Sarah. I’ve actually been using the “DF” on the pencil for a couple of years. It was my idea, but I paid a graphic artist to do it properly using part of an image I’d bought from istockphoto.com
Like all the best laws, yours is painfully true. (It also helps that you have an uncommon surname; if I ever formulated a law, I think I’d use my first name.)
This really happened: I was there, I watched…
Long time ago, I worked as a contractor for a small but upwardly mobile company. At that time the staff occupied a single floor of an office block in West London, a couple of directors, a secretary and a bunch of engineers.
One of the senior staff came in with the words ‘This memo is urgent: can you get it out quickly.’ [BIG mistake]. The secretary set to work typing up the one-page memo in Word. Something went wrong, she struggled with it, and got nowhere. So she called over one of the very bright and highly-paid engineers to help. He struggled with it and got nowhere, so he called over one of his colleagues. I don’t know what they were struggling with, but the words ‘I’ve never seen it do that before’ occurred more than once.
After a while most of the company’s technical staff were helping the poor girl to lash Word into producing this one-page memo. Finally they succeeded, and the print command was issued. The printer jammed. One of the highly-paid engineers unjammed the printer. The print command was issued again… and again the printer jammed. I cannot remember how many times this happened, but I do distinctly remember that at the very point when the printer was finally coaxed into life, just as I thought ‘Surely, nothing else can go wrong’… the toner cartridge exploded.
I am not making this up.
I hear these stories more often than I care to think about and it’s really the same story. People are using a tool but haven’t read the manual yet. TOC – It works if you use styles and it stays put and you don’t have to worry about bookmarks because you don’t use bookmarks! I’ve been troubleshooting Word documents since Word 97 and have NEVER found a Word document that went bad on its own. Sometimes it’s because text was copied from an old Word Perfect document or from the internet or even from Excel. Most often it has to do with a lack of understanding of styles and/or sections and/or graphics properties.
Don’t blame the tool if you haven’t read the manual! (Or taken a GOOD class – not the kind that are offered by “generic” training companies.