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• • May 1, 2020 at 1:13 pm #1242672
    Charles Downs

    Member

    I’ve been doing proposals for 15 years and using InDesign for 5+ years.

    I work for a large engineering company, working on proposals with an average of a 4-6 week turn around, ranging from 8 pages to 250 pages. Our current workflow is the Engineers work in Word for the Approach and misc. other sections. At the same time, my team is pulling together resumes and experience sections, mainly in InDesign. The Engineers then transfer their content to a Proposal Coordinator (me and my team), who puts it into InDesign (at about 75%-80% of the timeline). We also have Graphic Designers who do graphics, but not the document layout.

    We then send it off for a Red Team (internal review from a client perspective) to review and provide comments. From there, our workflow is mostly markups from the Engineers on a PDF (Acrobat or BlueBeam). Then the Coordinator incorporates the changes into InDesign, proofreads the document, then repeat until it’s submitted.

    We have a pretty effective template, with character, paragraph, object and table styles. We have pre-defined layouts in a CC Library that are shared across the team and that makes things work pretty well in terms of laying out the consistent areas of document such as bios and experience.

    Advice needed. Our workflow feels clunky. I’ve been looking for ways to make things more efficient for everyone and simple, but am coming up somewhat short. Is there some solution(s) that I’ve overlooked?

    What we’ve already tried:

    We purchased a subscription to GoProof, but are finding it difficult since there’s no time where we can really stop working on a document, send out a proof and wait for edits form the engineers . We’re constantly working to incorporate content, edits or even working on layout, due to the short schedule. So, no one really uses it.

    InCopy isn’t an option due to the number of Engineers who contribute to proposals and the general complexity of use (even if it’s just perceived).

    PDFs lack the group editing and ability to see changes (the engineers will send in 150 words to fill in a 50 word space).

    I’ve also looked at Mindsteam’s addon for grammar and spelling to make the final proofreading in InDesign easier. Has anyone used it?

  • May 1, 2020 at 4:12 pm #1242742
    Jeremy Howard

    Participant

    I wonder if it might make sense to have the engineers change up their workflow so that they are using Google Docs or Google Sheets instead of Word. You could then use a plug-in like EasyCatalog to flow data directly from Google Sheets into InDesign.

    Another potential solution would be WordsFlow. I haven’t used it much personally but I hear that it does some amazing things when it comes to linking content from Word files in an InDesign document.

    Both of these tools allow you to update the data in place from within InDesign so that your InDesign document will always reflect the latest changes to the data.

  • May 2, 2020 at 7:43 am #1242822
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    I agree with Jeremy, see if the engineers can use GoogleDocs or Google Sheets instead of what they’re using now, at least for the chunks of content that are constantly getting updated.

    Then you could emSoftware’s DocsFlow, which lets the designer link to and flow in directly from their Google Docs account. (The engineers should of course share their files with the designers, so they show up on your Google Docs account.)

    The beauty of DocsFlow is that while yes, the text frames in InDesign are linked to the original Docs file, just like a placed image is linked to its original AI or PS file, when you update the placed story to get the author’s changes, you don’t lose any of your text or format changes. Also all of the authors changes are captured as Track Changes automatically so you can see what they changed.

    AND you can map the styles in Google Docs to the paragraph and character styles in your ID file and save it as a preset, if you want them to flow in formatted (or mostly formatted) from the get-go.

    Go to emSoftware.com and download a trial, I think you’ll like it.

    AM
    PS I’m doing a free 1/2-hour webinar on DocsFlow and WordsFlow on Thursday, May 14, part of a series on remote workflows for publishers. More info/registration here: https://bit.ly/remote-wf1

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