To PDF or Not PDF, Part 4
At a previous position my manager ordered a replacement instrument exhaust fan. Since we didn't have the part, the instrument was useless. But a tech said with amazement, "I think I have one of those in my garage!" She went home and, sure enough, returned with a similar fan that worked.
It's all about accessibility. If you can't find it when you need it, it's gone.
And that is paper's fatal flaw. It is too easily damaged, misplaced, corrupted or thrown out. The only way to have it available at multiple locations is to make copies, creating a version control problem. It costs money to store and transport. Above all, paper is a physical device that consumes space.
Portable Document Format (PDF) manuals should solve the accessibility problem. Virtual storage is limitless, and a change once is a change everywhere. Finding what you need with a few mouse clicks is the raison d'être for online manuals.
But a PDF is slow. Were John Henry alive, he would grab the paper binder off the shelf and find the right page every time before all the Adobe Reader plug-ins even loaded.
The solution is using hyperlinks--just like that one--in policies and procedures to join them together. Imagine a map of links for your entire manual system that loads on startup at all terminals. Imagine any reference as a hyperlink to an electronic document. Paper can't be linked together so.
The full version of Adobe Acrobat is needed. Or (our administration vetoed this idea 2years ago) you can Save As a web page in Word. HTML-formatted documents are faster and just as secure as a PDF. HTML--the international standard--and hyperlinks already connect the internet. They can connect your policies and procedures, too.
Surf your manuals like the Web? Now, that would be something.