It turns out that there are plenty of simple. Sure, I could work in any spreadsheet application and export, but I didn’t want to add steps if possible. csv files are temporary data holders moving data from application to application, not a file format in which to work. Working with them, you get the sense that. csv file would be easy to use and wouldn’t require any particular text editor to edit, the layout is, visually, not easy to work with. The obvious solution was the Mail Merge or Data Merge, which, it turns out, Nisus handles well…from a. The manual explains a complicated workaround, but the problem didn’t exist in 1994 and could certainly be avoided today, too. This is a neat trick that I used all the time in Nisus Writer Classic, but as it’s currently implemented, the cross-reference won’t update correctly if you change the first or last character of the bookmarked text. It worked, but it was a bumpy ride as Kissel observed: I attempted to use Nisus’s bookmarks and cross references initially to handle my repetitive boilerplate needs. I downloaded the 30-day trial and started experimenting in the summer of 2011 and early fall with moving my workflow over to Nisus. From the sound of things, I figured this might be my app. Then came the release of Nisus Writer 2 and Joe Kissel’s comprehensive review. If there was a problem, though, it was trying to quickly proof a document in TextMate reading a markup language with that much formatting is kind of hard. It took a lot of fiddling at first to get the layout I wanted, but it wasn’t very hard, and I was able to get most of the advantages of the Data Merge by using TextExpander and its Fill-In feature. It was overall a very lightweight environment, using a markup syntax in a text editor, with very good final results in a PDF document. I enjoyed about a year of productivity using LaTeX in TextMate. In full-screen mode, it looks bizarre to me. It’s not terrible, and I haven’t spent that much time with it, but something about it just bugs me. All the heavy lifting of moving over to two new applications would of course be difficult, but the problem for me has always been that I just don’t like Pages’ interface very much. Pages and Numbers in their current incarnations can handle this workflow easily. I am, after all, a Mac user, and using the clunky Windows machine they give me at work isn’t how I want to work. The interface in Microsoft Office doesn’t seem to get better with successive releases, but worse I have to, unfortunately, use Office on my word PC, and I find the Ribbon interface utterly inscrutable. In fact, it’s been difficult for me to switch to another application because of the effort it would take for me to switch my workflow to the new applications.īut increasingly, I have pined for something else. I have no reason to begrudge the two apps’ service to me over many years. My workflow, then, consists of an Excel spreadsheet and Word document. Likewise, I am able to submit board motions each month using the same procedure. It’s also useful for letters with repeating blocks of information. I don’t like to do anything twice, and with technical writing, that is doubly so. I am able to populate a spreadsheet with basic data, such as a student’s name, gender, and standardized test score data (scores, percentile ranks, scores banded with error, and qualitative labels) once, and have both tables and narrative statements populated with the data. Word’s Data Merge / Mail Merge functionality has always been a time saver. There’s a lot of boilerplate, but it’s not all boilerplate. I write lengthy (but not very) reports of testing results, filled with a lot of scores and interpretation, and tables of said results. One of my major, if only, requirements since I finished graduate school for a Word Processor is to draft and submit documents in the office. So I’ve been using Word for a long, long time, but haven’t really cared for it. All of them have their plusses (Open Office’s only plus being its (lack of a) price and relative similarity to other applications), but I’ve never really settled. I’ve tried just about everything else: Apple’s Pages, Open Office and its offshoots, TextEdit, Mellel, and even LaTex. I’ve been trying to get away from Microsoft Word for about as long as I have been using it I was a WordPerfect user all through college, and I was sad when that venerable word processor was left behind.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |