Need professional document formatting help
February 22, 2022 6:02 PM Subscribe
Options for someone/something that can format long Word docs using my company's style guide.
I'm a project manager for a research organization that does government contracting (not a university). We publish large documents (600+ pages) with lots of tables that need to be formatted in Microsoft Word according to our style guide. We do not need editing, copywriting, etc. Just formatting.
Our long-term employee responsible for this task left the company a few months ago. My boss has, rather unhelpfully, *just last week* put me in charge of finding a solution by April 1st. I'm scrambling!
A few questions:
1) Are there organizations I can contract this type of work out to? If so, what kinds? Any recommendations?
2) Are there tech solutions that might solve the problem? Assume typical office worker level tech skills. I think something like LaTeX might be over our heads, although open to hearing I'm wrong.
3) Anything else I should consider? Hiring new folks is also on the table, but I don't want to count on that just yet.
We have multiple reports due in the next several months, and this is a critical step. I am losing sleep over this. Please help!
I'm a project manager for a research organization that does government contracting (not a university). We publish large documents (600+ pages) with lots of tables that need to be formatted in Microsoft Word according to our style guide. We do not need editing, copywriting, etc. Just formatting.
Our long-term employee responsible for this task left the company a few months ago. My boss has, rather unhelpfully, *just last week* put me in charge of finding a solution by April 1st. I'm scrambling!
A few questions:
1) Are there organizations I can contract this type of work out to? If so, what kinds? Any recommendations?
2) Are there tech solutions that might solve the problem? Assume typical office worker level tech skills. I think something like LaTeX might be over our heads, although open to hearing I'm wrong.
3) Anything else I should consider? Hiring new folks is also on the table, but I don't want to count on that just yet.
We have multiple reports due in the next several months, and this is a critical step. I am losing sleep over this. Please help!
How much attention has been paid, during the creation of these documents, to using Word's inbuilt Styles and Themes features for formatting, as opposed to the customary ad-hoc application of Bold and Italic and random fonts and extra blank paragraphs and drag-sized tables?
Pulling large numbers of Word pages formatted by people whose formatting skills can be most kindly described as rudimentary into line with an evolving house style will inevitably involve countless hours of undoing other people's laziness or ignorance. If you've got a lot of that stuff to do, you won't find a better way to do it than hiring a small army of Word curmudgeons and giving them soundproof workspaces to contain all the swearing.
But if the long-term employee formerly in charge of this area was good at their job, then a few months on you might only need one or two.
posted by flabdablet at 7:10 PM on February 22, 2022 [6 favorites]
Pulling large numbers of Word pages formatted by people whose formatting skills can be most kindly described as rudimentary into line with an evolving house style will inevitably involve countless hours of undoing other people's laziness or ignorance. If you've got a lot of that stuff to do, you won't find a better way to do it than hiring a small army of Word curmudgeons and giving them soundproof workspaces to contain all the swearing.
But if the long-term employee formerly in charge of this area was good at their job, then a few months on you might only need one or two.
posted by flabdablet at 7:10 PM on February 22, 2022 [6 favorites]
Came to say styles/themes. I wrote/edited four feet of Standard Operation Procedures (SOP) for a large animal food manufacturer just like that. All hundreds of procedures formatted the same way. But that was in 1993 and I haven't touched Word since then (pretty much).
You do one or two the hard way while building up styles/themes to use. Then you just have to sorta just select things and apply the style and boom there you go.
Obligatory story: I was hired through a temp agency to work with a consultant as basically a fast typist with decent skills for that time. I pushed the styles/theme out to the three plants and made them type them up (no more reading henscratch on paper and going back and forth. Turned it into mostly a copy editor sort of thing. Making sure it was eith grade level. And drawing all of the graphics from sketches or pictures. By the end of the contract we were trying to get them to buy into some computer based training/testing but they didn't go for it. Their loss.
posted by zengargoyle at 7:52 PM on February 22, 2022
You do one or two the hard way while building up styles/themes to use. Then you just have to sorta just select things and apply the style and boom there you go.
Obligatory story: I was hired through a temp agency to work with a consultant as basically a fast typist with decent skills for that time. I pushed the styles/theme out to the three plants and made them type them up (no more reading henscratch on paper and going back and forth. Turned it into mostly a copy editor sort of thing. Making sure it was eith grade level. And drawing all of the graphics from sketches or pictures. By the end of the contract we were trying to get them to buy into some computer based training/testing but they didn't go for it. Their loss.
posted by zengargoyle at 7:52 PM on February 22, 2022
Word's themes and styles are basically just a crude facsimile of Adobe Indesign. Honestly, you will save yourself time and money if you just let people format as they format, and then when it's done have someone pour the whole thing into Adobe InDesign, which is a much more robust way to design with a far more sophisticated outcome.
posted by Violet Blue at 8:02 PM on February 22, 2022
posted by Violet Blue at 8:02 PM on February 22, 2022
nthing the idea that you use styles or themes - in any kind of document, separating style from content is the best way to go (for example, CSS and HTML; XML; or for old school folks SGML - Standard Generalized Markup Language). When done correctly, you can make changes to the style definitions and it will "automagically" work in all the documents. The really hard part is to get the content creators to use the styles.
posted by TimHare at 8:20 PM on February 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by TimHare at 8:20 PM on February 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
Agreed that you are looking to use styles/themes in a (most likely Word) document template.
Many organizations have document templates for staff to use. Can you check with the entity* responsible for creating/enforcing the company style guide to see if they have one or will create one? Also check old reports to see if there is a template/ styles/ themes associated with it.
*I think most orgs at a critical mass reach the point where it is considered "good branding" to provide templates in addition to style guides. If your company doesn't have a Word Template, you should consider asking your boss to help you escalate this request to the appropriate party.
Formatting reports isn't rocket science, but it can be tedious, and does require close attention to detail. As a heads up, you may have to allocate extra time for QA review if someone external to your team is doing the formatting since they won't be as familiar with the content and house style of your reports.
Going the Indesign route would create a more "professional" looking product, but it may not fit the workflow of your team. In Word, it's basically trivial for the report author to make a last minute change to the text. To make the change once the report has been put into InDesign, the author will need to request that someone else make the change. In addition, since InDesign doesn't automatically re paginate text substantial additions and deletions to the text must be manually managed.
posted by oceano at 9:19 PM on February 22, 2022 [2 favorites]
Many organizations have document templates for staff to use. Can you check with the entity* responsible for creating/enforcing the company style guide to see if they have one or will create one? Also check old reports to see if there is a template/ styles/ themes associated with it.
*I think most orgs at a critical mass reach the point where it is considered "good branding" to provide templates in addition to style guides. If your company doesn't have a Word Template, you should consider asking your boss to help you escalate this request to the appropriate party.
Formatting reports isn't rocket science, but it can be tedious, and does require close attention to detail. As a heads up, you may have to allocate extra time for QA review if someone external to your team is doing the formatting since they won't be as familiar with the content and house style of your reports.
Going the Indesign route would create a more "professional" looking product, but it may not fit the workflow of your team. In Word, it's basically trivial for the report author to make a last minute change to the text. To make the change once the report has been put into InDesign, the author will need to request that someone else make the change. In addition, since InDesign doesn't automatically re paginate text substantial additions and deletions to the text must be manually managed.
posted by oceano at 9:19 PM on February 22, 2022 [2 favorites]
A contract copy editor should be willing to do this service for you at an hourly or by page rate (I don't have one to recommend but googling brings up a lot of them...). If you formerly had an employee doing this, I would think outsourcing it would be cheaper than replacing that position.
posted by Tandem Affinity at 9:28 PM on February 22, 2022
posted by Tandem Affinity at 9:28 PM on February 22, 2022
Oof, large volumes of tables in Word is a nightmare scenario I have lived too many times and I feel your pain.
Posters above are correct that a standard template with defined styles and themes will solve this problem in future *if* you have users who will apply those styles diligently. In my experience, even when users are trained in the use of templates and shown why disciplined formatting is important, a certain number will go off the rails and do their own thing anyway, or paste in material from an outside source with its own formatting and you end up doing a lot of manual fixes.
There are a couple of technological solutions you can try. You (or a Word/VBA automation specialist you hire to help) can write some macros to do things like "select all tables in the document and apply style X" but they tend to falter with large documents, and there are some things (e.g., header row font coloring) that can't be applied with just a table style. That same automation specialist can also write you a more complex but also more comprehensive workflow that fully reformats documents within Word itself. I'd start here and see if you can get a workable solution you can have your content authors apply on their own.
If you want to throw some more time and money into a tech solution, some nice text and document manipulation packages are available for Python (e.g., pandoc, sphinx). You can outsource or bring in a consultant to write you something that will strip out the content of a document, manipulate it in an alternative format, and republish to Word using the styling of your choice. You don't even need to start with Word docs if your tables can be written in simpler formatting. This is what my organization does, but we have that expertise and the infrastructure to manage it in house and don't need a fancy front end. For you it would be a short-term investment in a programmer, might take more than the month you have available to build, and you may need ongoing consulting to adjust the scripts as your needs change. Really slick when it works though!
posted by bunnysquirrel at 12:47 AM on February 23, 2022
Posters above are correct that a standard template with defined styles and themes will solve this problem in future *if* you have users who will apply those styles diligently. In my experience, even when users are trained in the use of templates and shown why disciplined formatting is important, a certain number will go off the rails and do their own thing anyway, or paste in material from an outside source with its own formatting and you end up doing a lot of manual fixes.
There are a couple of technological solutions you can try. You (or a Word/VBA automation specialist you hire to help) can write some macros to do things like "select all tables in the document and apply style X" but they tend to falter with large documents, and there are some things (e.g., header row font coloring) that can't be applied with just a table style. That same automation specialist can also write you a more complex but also more comprehensive workflow that fully reformats documents within Word itself. I'd start here and see if you can get a workable solution you can have your content authors apply on their own.
If you want to throw some more time and money into a tech solution, some nice text and document manipulation packages are available for Python (e.g., pandoc, sphinx). You can outsource or bring in a consultant to write you something that will strip out the content of a document, manipulate it in an alternative format, and republish to Word using the styling of your choice. You don't even need to start with Word docs if your tables can be written in simpler formatting. This is what my organization does, but we have that expertise and the infrastructure to manage it in house and don't need a fancy front end. For you it would be a short-term investment in a programmer, might take more than the month you have available to build, and you may need ongoing consulting to adjust the scripts as your needs change. Really slick when it works though!
posted by bunnysquirrel at 12:47 AM on February 23, 2022
Best answer: Yes, you can contract out this kind of work and for your situation over the next few months that's what I would do. I think a document specialist is probably what you're looking for, a full service design and editorial agency might have someone.
Longer term, you need to have easy to use templates, and to use all the internal comms and behaviour change skills you have access to, to get people to use them as consistently as possible. It helps enormously if the template is easy to use and formatting the table is as few clicks as possible. This works well enough in most other organisations that have this problem, although it is never 100%. We risk assess ours, and have a few people in-house who can fix problems. I've also had a lot of luck with showing people how I fix things so they can do it themselves (it is well within the competency of anyone who can also use excel at an intermediate level for example). We do insist that people use the templates, and make that team go back and put it into the template if they don't.
I wouldn't hire someone to do this work full time again as it just acts as a single point of failure.
posted by plonkee at 5:01 AM on February 23, 2022 [1 favorite]
Longer term, you need to have easy to use templates, and to use all the internal comms and behaviour change skills you have access to, to get people to use them as consistently as possible. It helps enormously if the template is easy to use and formatting the table is as few clicks as possible. This works well enough in most other organisations that have this problem, although it is never 100%. We risk assess ours, and have a few people in-house who can fix problems. I've also had a lot of luck with showing people how I fix things so they can do it themselves (it is well within the competency of anyone who can also use excel at an intermediate level for example). We do insist that people use the templates, and make that team go back and put it into the template if they don't.
I wouldn't hire someone to do this work full time again as it just acts as a single point of failure.
posted by plonkee at 5:01 AM on February 23, 2022 [1 favorite]
My company has worked with Instant Teams as a source for jobs similar to this.
posted by machine at 7:13 AM on February 23, 2022
posted by machine at 7:13 AM on February 23, 2022
At my university, they have a long list off the graduate student web site of local copy editors who format dissertations but also tons of other documents according to whatever specs you provide. You might be able to find a similar list at a university near you?
posted by joycehealy at 3:59 PM on February 23, 2022
posted by joycehealy at 3:59 PM on February 23, 2022
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posted by pinochiette at 7:04 PM on February 22, 2022