MadCap Software Forums

I am working on my company's disaster response plan, and I am using an online third-party solution. The biggest problem with this is the PDF output is beyond ugly. It applies styles that make no sense to the readability of the document. So I'm looking to convert it to another tool.

As I have gotten deeper into this product I can see that it uses some kind of subset of Word as an editor. It also has several small tables that contain lists of things like employee contact information and lists of variables like the company name and address, etc.

So my question as in the subject is would Flare be an appropriate alternative to consider converting to? My experience with Flare so far has been strictly printed output, so I have never explored the database capabilities of Flare.

Please tell me your experiences, positive and negative, if you have tried to do anything like this.

janet

You can work with tables within Flare, the question is what other functionality do you need aside from static content and a full text search/ToC?

Flare doesn't have features to create or work with databases, so what do you mean by the "database capabilities" of Flare?

As I recall, disaster recovery plans contain a large number of short, interconnected tables of information. So we are in a grey area of whether this type of information is best stored in a database, spreadsheet, or content management system like Flare. Right?

I have a similar dilemma with whether to convert legacy Excel spreadsheets to Flare topics. These spreadsheets contain thousands of rows of static information organized in groups. The spreadsheet is nothing but a large table editor.

In my situation, Excel is being used as a "db" to manage a large number of small chunks of inter-related information. I'm interested in hearing whether people have chosen to convert this type of information to Flare, or just left it in Excel or Access or whatever.

dandam wrote:I'm interested in hearing whether people have chosen to convert this type of information to Flare, or just left it in Excel or Access or whatever.

If the users of your information consume it only in those Excel spreadsheets, that there's no need to have that information pushed out to them in any other fashion, then I would just keep the information in the spreadsheets.

But if the information needs to be disseminated in other means such as in a PDF, a Word doc, or a knowledge base -- or if there are bits of information that are very similar but for phone numbers and names of personnel (to name a few things that might go in disaster plans) and so might benefit from the use of snippets and variables (not to mention conditions), then it might indeed be quite useful to manage that information in Flare. (Whew... that was a long sentence; sorry!)