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Subject:Re: Frame vs. Word Results From:Kuovonne Vorderbruggen <kvorderbruggen -at- CTES -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 1 Sep 1998 17:52:14 -0500
This thread seems to touch on my current experience
with starting to learn FrameMaker. Up to now I have
worked almost exclusively with Word because I use
RoboHelp in a small company.
What I like about Word:
- Macros, macros, macros
- extensive find & replace with combinations of formatting & wildcards
- navigating tables with arrow keys in flow of text
- field codes
- attaching templates to automatically update styles
- having multiple generated lists per file
- outline view
- print preview
- help system
- sharing files & importing files
- customizability
- autocorrect
- view options, esp. seeing spaces
- "insert" menu, esp for special characters
(my Frame QuickReference is about to fall about,
and I've put a shortcut to Character Map on the desktop)
What I like about Frame so far:
- table styles
- large documents / books
- generating & formatting TOC & index
- master pages
- references pages
- file size
- making .pdf files with links already there (although it bombs when I try it)
- paragraph autonumbering
- associating graphics with paragraph tags
- multiple columns / side heads
If anyone knows how to do the any of the things that
I like about Word in FrameMaker, I would love to know,
as I am trying to teach myself FrameMaker, and am
having a hard time using the help. (And taking a class
isn't an option right now.)
As a side note: I have yet to find something that I absolutely
cound not do in Word at all, including conditional text.
I've found lots of things that are a pain to do in Word,
but writing macros automates most of the tedious work,
and when I open a document that uses coding I haven't
worked with for a while I tear out a few hairs trying to figure
out what the heck I've done.
Side note 2: I recently got a copy of William Horton's
"Secrets of User-Seductive Documents" and it states
that the layout was done with Word!
