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> I've just started to get acquainted with FrameMaker (coming
> from Word 2000) and find FrameMaker very awkward and difficult
> to use. In my humble opinion, it is not very intuitive and
> the learning curve is very steep indeed! An additional problem
> is the documentation that, again im my humble opinion, is
> utter crap! There are no straightforward tutorials, there
> is not straightforward information at all, everything is kept
> very general and there are no detailed instructions on how to
> do certain things, e.g. how to change a template. For example,
> coming from Word, I expected the templates to have a different
> extension, but they don't have one, they're just documents...
> At the moment I am not a very happy bunny and have to force
> myself to go back to learning FrameMaker every morning. :-(
Hang in there. It gets better. Before long you hate it every time you have
to use Word for something.
Yeah, the interface could use a makeover, but once you get use to it you'll
find it far superior to Word. You won't have to fix auto numbering when it
just blows up like Word does. You won't open the file and find that all your
bullets changed from squares to round. You have to fight with headers and
footers suddenly changing and page numbers going crazy. At the end of our
revision cycles we used to spend an enormous amount of time fixing stuff
that Word screwed up to get our file ready to print.
Anyway, two book I would suggesting getting that may smooth the curve in the
learning curve:
Classroom in a Book, FrameMaker 6.0 by Adobe. Very good tutorial and will
help you with the basics of templates, etc.
Master Series, FrameMaker 6 by Thomas Neuburger, available on the Frameuser
website: http://www.frameusers.com/
Hope this helps.
_________________________________
Steven Shepard
Manager, Documentation Group
Yardi Systems, Inc.
819 Reddick Avenue
Santa Barbara, CA 93103
805/966-3822
steves -at- yardi -dot- com
www.yardi.com
IPCC 01, the IEEE International Professional Communication Conference,
October 24-27, 2001 at historic La Fonda in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.
CALL FOR PAPERS OPEN UNTIL MARCH 15. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
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