the correct program

[David F]

This is by no means a bash against MS Publisher.
I am working with a client that is assembling hundreds of reports utilizing
MS Publisher.
These are intricate financial reports with tables, graphs, charts etc. that
are many pages long, so it is by nature a very intense procedure.
The information comes mainly from Excel workbooks by way of copy and paste.
This has been an OK procedure but the fact remains that to insert a
page...redo page numbers and deal with the idiocincracies of ever changing
information have made this a nightmarish duty to say the least.

Would someone at least give me an idea if my theory is correct that MS Word
would be a better choice in this case for it's very robust nature and
ability to deal with the challenges of long documents over MS Publisher.
It has been working but there are many advantages I see that point to the
use of Word in this case.

Please make your suggestions good, bad and ugly.

David French

 

[Mary Sauer]

As you say, long documents are best done in Word.
If your goal is a good looking page layout, then Publisher is the product to
use.

You will have more problems moving images around in Word. Pages are difficult to
define. But then you don't have to contend with text boxes.

From the way you explained, you might be well off creating a report in Excel.

 

[David F]

The biggest issue has been bringing over a predefined area of information
from Excel and pasting it into either Publisher or Word. Pasted as a
metafile things are fuzzy...as straight paste extends off the page, parts of
the paste move around....
There are ranges of data, bar graphs, sometimes pie graphs and it's
hand-to-hand combat to make the information look even halfway decent.
These marketing people just want to make a professional looking report and
it looks like a 3rd grader did it.

The whole report is compiled currently in Publisher and finally sent to
Acrobat for conversion to PDF for security reasons. That is a whole other
story when PDF ends up making a chart a simple black box but that's not your
area of expertise.

If you have any suggestions I would sincerely appreciate it.

Dave

 

[Mary Sauer]

Have you tried Insert, Object, from file, browse to the graph or chart?

 

[Dave F]

The thing is they really need the information from a proprietary program
that pulls all the latest financial data. This is exported by that program
into MS Excel.
It is then that they select the cells needed and paste into (currently)
Publisher.

Now, here's another question.
If some highly talented developer (not me!) were to create some kind of
magic to pull information into a Publisher page, or a Word document, which
one of these 2 programs will be more likely to succeed?
Again, I'm no bashing Publisher...I'd just like someones candid opinion that
knows more than I do about the higher functions of the MS Office programs.

Dave

 

[Mary Sauer]

Word...