If I thought a pre-formatted and mangled Word document, filled with imported Excel charts was trouble, what then for a list provided to me as a series of tables?
I asked - ever the optimist - if they had a bare text version of the list, not formatted into the dozen or so individual 2-column tables. It's not as if they needed to be 2-column, even. They knew the final document would be a fairly basic list because that's what they'd asked me to provide a template for. Last year's fancy tables looked crap, after all.
But no. All I got was a rather puzzled look and confirmation that all they had was the document full of tables. That's how the list had been collated.
And, because the net result of trying to work with such tables tends to be either (a) everything but the tables gets copied into the final document or (b) everything including the tables, still in table form, gets copied into the document and so still needs to be reformatted, I opened up a new OpenOffice document and copied the tables into list form, cell by cell, eliminating sponsor logos where necessary.
Didn't take long but, boy, was I cursing...
Well, sighing. And probably tutting.
Seriously, though, why are these people so fascinated with tables? For everything?
Still, shan't complain too loudly... Since my colleague hadn't caught up to her satisfaction, I've been drafted in for one more day... There's also the small matter of a couple of guide books I've been working on that are as yet incomplete because the folks providing the content haven't yet provided all the content... so I (hopefully) get to finish them off tomorrow...
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