Report writing
I have spent probably 30% of my working life writing reports and presentations, and now the thought of writing them fills me with dread. At this point those who know me probably think I am going to write about arthritic hands, but no, its the medium that’s the problem. Having started to write a blog it’s difficult to contemplate another medium for writing, and having started working with mind maps and concept maps it’s difficult to go back to sequential presentations. I would happily accept wiki’s for collaborative authoring as an alternative to blogs, but blogs have the amazing benefit of providing the author with full control of content and presentation, and allow the author to build not just on their own knowledge but on the knowledge of others, “on the shoulders of giants” and all that. On the subject of giants Don Box motivated me to write this little post.
Conventional reports are dead. I hate them. I prefer blogging for logging ideas and soliciting comments and some form of website, e.g. wiki, for documenting designs, architectures, etc. rich content structures. I am advocating these for my programmes. The problem is that often the customer stipulates Word Documents as ‘the delverable’; things that one prints to read on paper:-(
I have been wondering if we could use something like Adobe Acrobat to allow us to publish, using Acrobats Link following functions it would create a compound freestanding document. You could then add a seperate title page to it, with version numbers and signatures etc.