Flare for training materials

[mlewin]

Hi all,

Our company has recently acquired Flare and I'm looking into its suitability for creating training documentation.

Currently, we have two main documents for each course we deliver: an instructor manual and a student workbook. Both contain slides exported from Powerpoint and exercises, with the only difference being that the instructor manual has the notes from the Powerpoint slides, whereas the student workbook has blank space for students to write their own notes. Both manuals are created in Word using a company-approved template and the whole lot is converted into a PDF for our printers.

Every time we make a change to the slides, we end up having to change the slide image in the workbooks. With 30+ courses this has proved to be a nightmare! Also, many of our training customers need the courses to be customised in some way. Usually this just involves removing a module or two which sounds like it should be simple, but it isn't.

Is Flare going to help us with this? Is anyone on this list creating similar materials with Flare? Would I be able to import our company Word template into Flare?

I'd appreciate your advice and comments.

Many thanks.

Mark

[bobmoon]

Interesting question, Mark. We are not using Flare for training guides, but it seems that it should work. Creating an instructor guide and student guide from one source is the same as creating help for two related products or creating customized help for professional services clients. You will have a good bit of work on the front end to get it set up, but it should be very rewarding on the back end when you can make a change in one place and quickly generate both guides from one source.

My guess is you'll use conditional text or formatting to handle the instructor notes, though that will depend on how your guides are structured. You will not be able to simply import the Word template to get your formatting. Flare does not think about page layout in the same way that Word does. You'll have a bit of a learning curve getting your page layout and stylesheet set up, but it sounds like it will be worth the effort. And there are lots of helpful propeller heads around here who can answer your questions.

Bob

[mlewin]

Thanks Bob! Do you know if there's a way to import Powerpoint slides as images in Flare with/without notes, or will that have to remain a manual process?

[bobmoon]

Thanks Bob! Do you know if there's a way to import Powerpoint slides as images in Flare with/without notes, or will that have to remain a manual process?

I don't think you can import from PowerPoint directly into Flare. It will import Word documents, but not PPT to my knowledge.

Bob

[SteveS]

Another approach that may work is to convert the slides into jpg/png format outside of Flare whenever they are changed and overwrite the image in Flare's resources.

I've used Flare to create training material, but from within the product's documentation. The how to section from a software manual can be used as a basis for a training document, although self assessment activities had to be added. Condition tags and a custom TOC helps.

HTH

[Paul Griffiths]

I'd appreciate some advice regarding this topic.

Trainers in our organisation are beginning to ask if they can access and add to the Flare projects produced by the TWs.

I'm not sure what to recommend. A full Flare licence seems like overkill, given that Trainers won't be producing any help formats.

Would Trainers with X-Edit be able to access and add to our Flare pojects? Or would they need Blaze?

[Adrian Durand]

Hi Paul,

I believe that X-Edit will allow your Trainers to create topics that can be integrated into your Flare project (depending on the version).

On reading the sales documentation X-Edit Contribute allows users to create topics using pre-defined templates, and the full licensed X-Edit allows the use of the css and table styles etc so any topics that your trainers create have the correct styles and formatting.

Our company has very recently done exactly this, upgraded my Flare, and Capture licences to Madpak and also purchased two licensed copies of X-Edit for my colleagues.
This was the preferred option in order to ensure that the final editing and builds are done by myself to ensure that all other relevant topics (e.g. TOC, Index etc) are completed prior to a build being carried out.

I am hoping to persuade my colleagues to start producing some documentation soon so I can validate the process, but these things take time

Regards

Adrian

[owilkes]

Hi all,

Aware this thread was last updated a year ago, but the topic is still relevant.

I'm starting a pretty big project to merge our user guides, training courses and context sensitive help (for starters) into a single-source database, from which those outputs would be generated.

I'm having difficulty persuading the trainers that the output from Flare is in any way equal to the powerpoints they have at the moment. To an extent it is a case of people not liking change, but to be fair, Powerpoint has a number of features that the output we have from Flare does not have. It is also of course easier to just create some ppt slides, rather than contribute to a topic, tag it, and wait for the output.

Has anyone encountered/overcome these difficulties?

Are there any tricks out there for quickly/easily converting output into PPT? (we have over 100 training courses, I need the trainers onside and would prefer to avoid wasted effort if the conversion from pdf, say, to PPT is the only approach.

Thanks.

[GaryJHarris]

Has anyone tried using MadCap Mimic to import PPT files and then edit once from that point on?

[JoyceBRID]

Hello Mark,
Would you share what your original instructor guide and student workbook and the Flare PDF conversions? I'd like to compare the before and after.