From: Andrew P. Black [mailto:black@cse.ogi.edu] I have an explanation for this. I think of writing like programming.
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My administrative staff thought of writing like typing: what you see is all you've got.
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One thing that I notice is that the Word documents that I'm sent almost always use visual formatting, and rarely use styles.
As an apps trainer: Styles are very confusing to new users of a word-processing package. This is not helped by most Word courses putting them in the 'intermediate' or 'advanced' part of the course. Also, many/most admin staff typically create one- and two-page documents, where styles are rarely useful. When I teach Word, I spend 10 minutes on styles in the fundamental (1-day) course; about two-thirds of the delegates get the idea, but very few are able to use them successfully and almost all move back to the WYSIAYG mentality by the end of the course.
I moved from Frame via AmiPro to Word, just as Word gained character styles (and one of my major bitches was removed). I've written 400-page manuals in Word, and [that part of] it works fine as long as you use *entirely* styles and never touch the normal formatting controls.
- Peter