Hi, I hope you don't mind me introducing myself to the list and then asking a question straight away. My name is Mark, I am based in Oxford, UK, and I write reports that assist pharmaceuticals with their marketing authorisations - at least that's the interesting part of my job.
I've been looking at Framemaker for some time now, basically as an alternative to grappling with changing layouts in Microsoft Word and Publisher. The bottom line is that I enjoy writing content but I loathe the fiddling around with layout. The fiddling always seems to involve 1) thinking that everything looks ok 2) printing a hardcopy, and then realising that it doesn't look so good so editing it until my waste bin is, well, full of waste. My first step into Framer-dom (other than watching the Adobe demo and downloading some whitepapers) was buying a cheap sealed copy of Framemaker 5.5 in March on Ebay, which I plan to upgrade, either to 7.2 or 8 (when it's available). The reason I am being so hesitant to just go out and buy the software and subsribe to every training course available (other than cashflow) is that I am basically unsure whether Framemaker will do the job I want it to, hence I will try to describe what I need as follows in the hope that someone can advise me. My job involves producing 40 page reports in Microsoft Word. These reports are nearly identical. I use the mailmerge feature in Word to import variables such as the date of the report, the name of the product on which the report is based, the final score that the product achieved and so on. These are inserted at the relevant points in the text using mailmerge. Tables and graphs from an Excel spreadsheetare are then copied and pasted into the report manually. Is this something that I can do better using Framemaker? Please bear in mind that I am something of a perfectionist and would like to make my reports look beautiful, but easy to produce. Would listees please share their experiences in terms of how long it took them to get to grips with this kind of functionality (I speak of mailmerge type things)? I hope I have expressed myself clearly. If there is any further information I need to provide please let me know. I really appreciate your attention and look forward to making your acquaintances, Best wishes, Mark Mark Lawrence Director First Read This +44 01865 30 40 52 www.firstreadthis.com
