Re: What I can't do with Word...

["Ridder, Fred" <F -dot- Ridder -at- DIALOGIC -dot- COM>]

David,

Word can indeed do conditional text, but you do have to use a trick
to accomplish it.

Other posters have suggested the If/Then field codes. But even if you
get this to work the way you want for two variant versions of a
document,
you'll probably throw up your hands trying to scale it up to three or
more
variants.

The approach I've used with good success uses named character styles.
You simply define as many character styles as you need variant versions
and apply each of those styles to text that should only appear in one
specific version of the document. To help you keep track of everything
while you're editing, you can define the different conditional character

styles to display in different colors. Then, when you're ready to
produce
output, you define all the non-relevant character styles to be Hidden,
and
the one relevant character style to be black (rather than the color
you've
been using during editing). This trick is not as flexible as true
conditional
text controlled by Boolean variables, but in many cases it will get the
job
done...

Fred Ridder ( f -dot- ridder -at- dialogic -dot- com )
Senior Technical Writer
Dialogic Corp.
Parsippany, NJ

And to keep our marketing people happy:
Get the Dialogic Edge at http://www.dialogic.com



> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Girardot [SMTP:dmgirard -at- CORNETLTD -dot- COM]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 1998 4:25 PM
> Subject:      What I can't do with Word... was "RE: Frame vs. Word
> Results"
>
> Mike,
>
> At my shop we use Word for everything too, but will be looking at
> Frame for
> the following reasons:
>
> - difficulty doing long-document cross-references
> - difficulty doing lots of embedded docs or graphics
> - need to do conditional text
>
> The last one is probably the top priority.  We generally require 2-3
> versions of a given manual or set of training curriculum, and it would
> be
> much easier to simply maintain all of the versions in one master set
> with
> conditional text.
>
> -- David
>
> PS.  Does anyone know what your options are for doing Online Help with
> Frame?
>
> ---David M Girardot---dmgirard -at- cornetltd -dot- com------------
> --[Senior Tech Writer & Information Specialist]---------
> --[CorNet International, Ltd.]--------------------------
> [Opinions expressed in this message are my own.]--------
> --

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