Creating a brochure to be updated by those without Adobe InDesign

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
May 25, 2022
11 replies
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I want to create a brochure for an annual event that can be passed down to future even organizers. Is there something I can creative within adobe creative suite that can than be saved in a way that someone with just access to MSWord or similar could update the text?

How to

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L

Laubender

Community Expert

Hi Alyson,

well, with the help of the WordsFlowPro plug-in for InDesign by emsoftware you can establish a workflow that might work for your clients with MSWord. You'll first do your layout with InDesign and by the help of that plug-in you could export one MSWord file for every story in InDesign to your client could edit and maintain. Read into your options and download a test version:

http://emsoftware.com/products/wordsflow/

Allow yourself some days for experimenting and testing the workflow with your clients.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

Peter Spier

Community Expert

My two cents, do it in word. If that's waht your users have and use, that's the application to use.

Derek Cross

Community Expert

The thing about Word documents is that they are limited in the kinds of designs that can be produced – you can only include simple text and images. Whereas Powerpoint has a whole range of facilities for placing images and shapes and including fine typography and you can send the pages to customers for them to edit themselves before you output it to PDF for printing. Here are some real-life examples of print documents produced with Powerpoint.

(Images courtesy of Nolan Haims Creative)

Peter Spier

Community Expert

I suspect that you can get more sophisticated output from Powerpoint, but you probably also need a more sophisticated user. Inept users can screw up almost anything.

BobLevine

Community Expert

You've been given some suggestions but the real answer to your question is no. Even with InCopy, you wouldn't be able to export a high-quality PDF.

Derek Cross

Community Expert

The best way to do this is to create the brochure in Powerpoint, it can then be passed to others for revision. Anyone who has MSWord is likely to also have Powerpoint. The application is far more sophisticated nowadays than the earlier versions.

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

It's generally not a good idea.

The usual workflow is that they supply you with an MS Word file and all the images required in a separate folder.

You can help them with this by providing templates of each section in MS Word. Plus stressing that images must be supplied separately.

If you create a Template in InDesign with fake text (or the real text) and then export the threaded frames to a RTF - open that in MS Word and you should retain your text styles for paragraphs and character styles. And along side this you can include all the images for that section as a separate folder - within the text you can put text markers written as <Picture 1.jpg> or whatever image is required for that location.

They can then edit this MS Word file to replace the text and supply it to you. And they can update all the images in the folder and indicate within the text where each image is required.

Something like <<INSERT IMAGE Picture 1>> then you can easily spot or find the location of the image placement.

At the end of each designed annual - you can export each section again to RTF then save as MS Word and include the images for those pages.

This provides a clear handover procedure.

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The other method would be that they purchase a copy of InCopy.

But it require that they would need training on how to handle this workflow.

It could be more trouble than it's worth especially if it's changing hands every year.

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There are 3rd party solutions, but my exploration of these in the past were they were expensive and may not suit. But if money is not an issue, then let me know and I'll see what I can dig up again.