--- Mark Lawrence <marklawrence at firstreadthis.com> wrote: > 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. ============================ FrameMaker has no built-in capability comparable to mailmerge. You don't describe what the source is of the mailmege data. If the source is some kind of database, there are companion products (such as UniMerge) which do work with FrameMaker, and these combinations are far more powerful than mailmerge. ============================== Tables and graphs from an Excel > spreadsheet are are then > copied and pasted into the report manually. ============================ Do you receive the data in Excel, or do you take raw data and convert it to a spreadsheet? Either way, there are probably much better ways to get it into a form that will work with FrameMaker/UniMerge. I have a PDF (about 6 pages) which describes the capabilities of the FrameMaker/Unimerge combination. An alternaitve approach (although in same ways less adaptable than UniMerge) would be to take the raw data you receive for each report and convert it into an XML instance, and use structured FrameMaker to process each XML instance. This would require that the raw data for each product be reducible to a single XML structure which is replicated in a FrameMaker EDD that specifies not only the structure, but also all the information needed to format the information in FrameMaker. ================================== What I conclude is that your present methodology using Word is that most of your time using your present methodology is on the Word sids. A UniMerge or XML solution would shift most of your work to a one-time development or a UniMerge or XML solution which produces a ready-to-print FrameMaker output with virtually no tweaking. ======================== If you are interested, I have a 6-page PDF which describes the FrameMaker/Unimerge solution. I hope this helps your decision-making. I have no doubt that either a UniMerge or XML solution would be far superior to your present methodology, and would indulge your desire for perfection. =============================
