Can Flare do these things?

[bsmyth]

Hi:

I am currently evaluating a demo version of Flare 6 to see if it can perform certain functions that our company needs. However, as you know, there is a certain curve associated with learning Flare, and since some of the things I want it to do might be considered "intermediate-advanced," I'm having trouble, as a novice, figuring out if Flare is what we need. So I thought I'd ask here.

Can Flare be set up to do these things:

-can it read a cell in a spreadsheet for particular content for a topic? In other words, if I have a CSV or Excel file, can the various cells in it be sourced by Flare to be put into specific places in the resulting publication in some way?

-let's say a project is made up of multiple topics; can each file associated with each topic live in different places on a network? In other words, when publishing to a target, is Flare capable of going out to network drive H://his_share/Flare_Topics/bobsDirectory/ to find Topic 1, network directory J://your_share/Flare_Topics/mikesDirectory/ for Topic 2, as it assembles the target? Or maybe this is something that happens before actual publishing in some shape or fashion, i.e., it will collect the content for the topics from various networked sources? Or maybe there is an other, more elegant way to solve this problem (X-Edit, for example)? Which leads me to the next question:

-I see there is collaboration functionality built into Flare (check in, check out)--how does that work exactly? Let's say I have Associates A, B, C, and we're all networked in an office, and we're all working collaboratively on a user manual. Briefly, how can we all work together on the network where A B and C all contribute/revise their text and I, the editor, assemble everything? I know the contributors can email their contributions via X-Edit, but are there other ways?

I've looked fairly hard for the answers to these questions before asking here, and maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, 'cause I couldn't really find them. Thank you for your indulgence and help.

-bs

[SteveS]

...-can it read a cell in a spreadsheet for particular content for a topic? In other words, if I have a CSV or Excel file, can the various cells in it be sourced by Flare to be put into specific places in the resulting publication in some way?

If I understand what you are asking, the answer is no. It seems you want to use a spreadsheet as a database, outputting content to Flare.

You might be able to achieve something similar by using a globally linked project instead of your spreadsheet, and either import certain cotent to your destination project or import an entire topic and use conditional tags to control output.

-let's say a project is made up of multiple topics; can each file associated with each topic live in different places on a network? In other words, when publishing to a target, is Flare capable of going out to network drive H://his_share/Flare_Topics/bobsDirectory/ to find Topic 1, network directory J://your_share/Flare_Topics/mikesDirectory/ for Topic 2, as it assembles the target? Or maybe this is something that happens before actual publishing in some shape or fashion, i.e., it will collect the content for the topics from various networked sources? Or maybe there is an other, more elegant way to solve this problem (X-Edit, for example)? Which leads me to the next question:

You can do this with global project linking. Use each of your source files as a linked project.

-I see there is collaboration functionality built into Flare (check in, check out)--how does that work exactly? Let's say I have Associates A, B, C, and we're all networked in an office, and we're all working collaboratively on a user manual. Briefly, how can we all work together on the network where A B and C all contribute/revise their text and I, the editor, assemble everything? I know the contributors can email their contributions via X-Edit, but are there other ways?...

I think you are looking at Flare's tools that integrate with source control (TFSA, VSS, etc). You need additional software for these features to work.

HTH

[SteveS]

...And welcome to the forums!

[bsmyth]

Thank you very much!

[Hobbes]

-can it read a cell in a spreadsheet for particular content for a topic? In other words, if I have a CSV or Excel file, can the various cells in it be sourced by Flare to be put into specific places in the resulting publication in some way?

Technically, the answer to this one is, no. However, there is a way to use a spreadsheet as a data source to populate a project. Here is what I have done on several occasions:
1. Open a MS Word document to create a 'template' for the data you want in Flare.
2. Use mail-merge in Word to put the fields from Excel in all the right places.
3. Run the merge and have it put all the results in a single Word file.
4. Import it in to Flare, map the styles, and have it break in to a new topic for each H1 (or whatever heading you use).

I know this sounds weird, but it works great. I've used it to build several hundred topics out of spreadsheet in just a few hours. You still have to build a ToC and do some other cleanup, but it is worth it. One last note. When you set up the data source in Word, make sure you select, "MS Excel Worksheets via DDE." This is important since the standard method may truncate some longer fields in your data otherwise.

[bsmyth]

Thanks for the tip! I'll probably end up using this technique in some form or fashion.

[crice]

I'm in almost exactly the same situation, and as it's a year later and a new version of Flare, I'm wondering (hoping!) if there's been an update and we can now import data from an Excel spreadsheet into Flare.

I'm trying to put together a price list/catalogue that already exists in Excel, it needs to incorporate a title, description, codes, sizes, and prices for each item in basically a big table. It'd be nice not to have to re-type it all

Thanks!

[NorthEast]

I'm in almost exactly the same situation, and as it's a year later and a new version of Flare, I'm wondering (hoping!) if there's been an update and we can now import data from an Excel spreadsheet into Flare.

I'm trying to put together a price list/catalogue that already exists in Excel, it needs to incorporate a title, description, codes, sizes, and prices for each item in basically a big table. It'd be nice not to have to re-type it all :)

Thanks!

There are a few ways to get this into Flare:

1) You can copy the sheet in Excel and then paste it into Flare (paste it as a table); although that will be plain text, and will lose any formatting.

2) To keep the formatting, first save the spreadsheet as a web page (HTML file) from Excel. You can save an individual sheet or the whole workbook; if you save the workbook, your individual sheets are contained in a sub-folder. Then import the individual htm file(s) for the sheet(s) into Flare, using Project > Import HTML Files. You will need to use the include resources option, as this will import the CSS file generated by Excel that contains the styles.