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• • February 16, 2010 at 8:03 am #54914
    Frederick Yocum

    Member

    As an experienced designer who has learned to layout pages in PageMaker, Xpress and now InDesign I, yet again, find my tail between my legs when it comes to building pages in Word.

    This is a shame, because as an inhouse designer I am often asked to comment on or provide templates in Word. This happened again this week, and after two hours of trying to figure out how to sort out a simple four page newsletter I had to walk away crying and rubbing my eyes. As usual internal client, is left creating their own little muddle.

    This must stop. I cannot be humiliated, yet most of the books, Web pages I have looked at are not much help. The Word 2003 Bible (did I mention our standard is Word 2003) had meagre 18ish pages devoted to Sections, which are supposed to be the major building blocks when creating pages in Word.

    I need access to resources that will show an InDesigner how best to THINK in Word and layout pages where pictures stay where they are suppose to, columns end up where they need to be, mastheads stay on the mast, and side bars stay on the side, fonts don't get fuddled, etc.

    TIA

  • February 16, 2010 at 9:41 am #54915
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I'm so sorry to read of your terrible situation. Word makes me itch.

    This isn't exactly what you wanted, but it's definitely worth a read, as it focuses on getting InDesign documents exported to a Word format (kind of):

    https://creativepro.com/art…..-templates

  • February 16, 2010 at 3:07 pm #54916
    Frederick Yocum

    Member

    Thanks David, I found that link earlier in prep for tackling the project and took notes from it. I will look at it again.

    Both I and the client don't know what we are doing in Word most of the time, so cacky workrounds using multiple text boxes and picture fudges come into play, making it very difficult to a) figure what the client was thinking when they did what they did, b) find an acceptable solution, c) have the moral authority to enforce it.

    Perhaps what I should do next is to try and find some Microsft-produced templates of newsletters and brochures and reverse engineer them to see how they put them together.

    Alot of the desktop publishing models of thinking are similar, there are character and paragraph styles — but the actual building of the page is very different. One article described a Word document as containers inside containers inside containers, certainly the concept of a page being a finite object of particular size seems to be forgien with the Word document world.

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