A crash course in Microsoft Word and Google Docs for MadCap Flare users

In the late 1990s, I had what was a rite of passage for most technical writers at the time. I was completing a student co-op with a software company based out of Edmonton. My primary task was to create a template for all of the company’s user guides in Microsoft Word and then migrate existing user guides to this template while updating their contents. It was a lot of work but also a fantastic learning experience. During the last week of my co-op, I was to generate PDF versions of all the guides. But when I opened the first guide’s .doc files, it happened: The numbering of every page, heading, figure, and table in the document was set to “1.” I opened the other .doc files and found the same problem. I spent the last week of my co-op franticly resetting field codes across dozens of .doc files.

I am far from the only technical writer to encounter such a snafu with Word. Word’s infamous fragility is a reason many of us switch to more advanced and robust tools like MadCap Flare.

Over a quarter century later, however, Word—and its newer rival, Google Docs—still show up in job postings for technical writers. So is it time to revisit using word processors as primary authoring tools for technical documentation?

This is the fourth in a series of articles for Flare users that provide crash courses into other popular technical writing tools. This article focuses on Microsoft Word and Google Docs.

Not your father’s Word

The Word of today is quite different from the one I worked with in my co-op more than 25 years ago.

Arguably, the biggest changes to Word happened in the 2007 Microsoft Office System. The most visible—and controversial—change to Word and the other Office apps was the replacement of menus and toolbars with a ribbon user interface.

However, there were more consequential changes for technical writers in this release:

• Office Open XML file formats. The adoption of this new file format changed Word’s default file extension from .doc to .docx. Under the hood, Word files were now written in XML. You can see this XML for yourself by adding “.zip” to the end of a Word file’s name and then opening the resulting Zip file in File Explorer or your preferred Zip file reader. According to Microsoft, Office Open XML files are smaller, more secure, and easier to recover from file damage than the legacy Office formats.
• Themes. While older versions of Word allowed you to create and apply styles to paragraphs, characters, and other elements and create templates, Word 2007 introduced the concept of themes. You could apply a theme to one or more of your documents and change the color, fonts, and other visual components of the documents in a single step. (Themes are similar in concept to the Branding Editor in Flare.)

• Quick parts (including building blocks). Quick parts replaced Word’s legacy fields, which caused me such consternation in my student days. They allow you to insert common document features like cover pages, tables of content, bibliographies, document properties (such as document titles and authors), user names, dates, and more. They’re analogs to Flare’s snippets, variables, and—to some extent—topic and snippet templates.

Moving Word to the cloud

The second wave of changes to Word happened in the 2010s. In response to competition from Google and others, Microsoft moved Word and the other Office apps to the cloud. Not only could you store your Word files on your OneDrive or in a SharePoint library, but you could also open and view them online using the cloud-based version of Word.

Moving Word online has made it possible to collaborate with others on the same document at the same time. Gone are the days of trying to open a Word file on a network share to only find out that someone else had left the file open on their PC (and that someone had left the office for the day).

In my own experience, group-writing a document is not a practical application of this feature. Writing is still a solitary endeavor. But allowing multiple people to open and modify a document at the same time does enhance the editing and review process, particularly when you have multiple reviewers who can sometimes provide conflicting input. With online calibration, these reviewers can see each other’s feedback in real time and respond accordingly.

Additional benefits of moving Word (and Word files) online include:

• Built-in version control. OneDrive and SharePoint save a complete version history of all the changes you make to a document. Reviewing your version history and rolling back a document to a particular version is relatively painless.
• Basic content management features. A document library in SharePoint is a type of list. Like all lists, you can add columns to a document library. You can use these custom columns to store information about the documents, such as their owners and the products or services to which they apply. Although you can create a traditional folder structure in a SharePoint library, using columns to capture meta data provides a little more flexibility and can be a way of creating a basic content management system for your documentation.

A Copilot for your Word authoring

After the launch of Chat GPT in 2022, Microsoft made a concerted effort to integrate AI into all of its products, including Word.

Subscribers to Microsoft’s Copilot can new use the AI agent with Word to write new content or summarize or revise existing content.

With all of the changes Microsoft has made to word in the last two and half decades, it is a much more robust product than the one I struggled with at the turn of the century. While Word is by no means perfect (no software is) and may not have all the features of a specialized tool like Flare, it is “good enough” for a lot of technical writers, particularly those creating content for internal audiences.

An alternative to Word: Google Docs

Of course, an important driver for many of the changes in Word, particularly the move online and the integration of AI, is increased competition in the last twenty years. The single biggest competitor to Word is Google Docs.

Google Docs has always been a web-based word processor. A free version is available to everyone. A paid version, as part of Google Workspace, includes additional features and increased available storage. There are also several third-party add-ons available, including ones that allow you to create custom styles and flag content with conditions.

Like Word Online, Google Docs facilitates online collaboration. You can store files in Google Drive and view a revision history. Google is also integrating its Gemini AI agent in Google Docs the same way Microsoft is integrating Copilot into Word.

Google Docs doesn’t offer as many features as Word or Flare. As a technical writer, you might find this limiting, but it can also make it easier for subject matter experts and others to contribute to your content.

A small but important shift in the document authoring process

Microsoft and Google’s move to cloud-based platforms introduces a small but important shift in how we create and publish documents.

With Flare and most other authoring tools, you need to transform your content from the source format into a format that your readers can access, whether its HTML, PDF, or print. In Flare, you accomplish this by building outputs using the built-in compiler or the separate madbuild.exe.

With Word and Google Docs, you can post your files on OneDrive, SharePoint, or Google Drive, set permissions so that your users can view but not modify them, and then share them by distributing a link—no conversion required.

Although this simplified process might be problematic for public facing documentation and more complex workflows, for situations where Word or Google Docs are “good enough,” removing the need to convert documents to reader-accessible formats can be a significant time saver.

Covering an important need in the tech comm ecosystem

There will always be companies for which a full-featured documentation solution like Flare is too costly, two complex, and too cumbersome. Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and other word processors can be the “good enough” alternatives these companies need.

Beyond this, Word, Google Docs, and other mainstream products can help drive innovation in specialized markets by introducing features like online collaboration and AI integration. (MadCap recently added online collaboration to Flare Online and similarly added AI support in 2023.)

Creating documentation in Word used to be rite of passage in technical writing. Today, when you need to create documentation using Word, Google Docs, or any other general purpose word processor, think of it as an opportunity for growth and innovation.