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Subject:Word to FrameMaker -- thanks for the help From:Alex Ragen <alex -at- CHECKPOINT -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 27 Aug 1996 13:31:24 +0300
To all who replied to my plea asking for advice on switching from Word to
FrameMaker, my most sincere thanks. Your replies were informative, to the
point, and helpful.
In the end, the decision to switch was made for me by outside forces, which
forced me to conform to their standard way of doing things, but I suspect I
would have made the switch myself in about 6 months time in any case.
Rather than publish a digest of the replies, I will summarize them quickly here:
The verdict was unanimous: EVERYONE recommended switching.
My only caveat is this - one of the reasons given by some was that Word
cannot really handle long documents. True, true. But if you split up a long
book into many chapters and stay far away from Word's Master Document
un-feature, you can comfortably manage a book hundreds of pages long with
the help of the RD field. But, Word doesn't have the concept of a book, that
is, of a related group of files. This means that chapter numbering is your
problem (with fields) and cross-referencing chapters is tricky but can be
done. If you're willing to live with these restrictions, you can hold out
with Word a little longer.
Word also has a prettier GUI, but that's neither here nor there.
I have made the switch and am going through the angst of learning a new GUI
and way of thinking, but I can already see FM's benefits and have no doubt
that I did the right thing. To all others making the switch, I wish you and
best of luck and I know that one day soon you will be glad you did it.
-- Alex
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Alex Ragen <alex -at- checkpoint -dot- com>
Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. http://www.checkpoint.com
Jabotinsky 35 Ramat Gan, Israel 52511
phone: +972 3 613 1833 - fax: +972 3 575 9256
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