How I Miss RoboHelp

[Bambina_Mena]

Not much that I try with Flare is successful. Now, I am trying to import a Word (Office 2007) document. I have a stylesheet created by my company but none of the styles in the stylesheet are there on the import. I've read, read, read, and re-read the guide to importing. Anyway ever encounter this? I am so exasperated that naturally, once I get beyond this hurdle, something else will come up. You almost have to be a software developer to use this product or to even understand its errors. I feel so stupid.

[Msquared]

Hi and welome to Flare and the forums. Fear not. You are among friends.

When you import, on the screen that asks you if you want to associate a stylesheet with our project, make sure you select the "Don't Preserve MS Word Styles" option. Then click Next, and on the next screen you should see all the styles in your Word document and all the styles in your Flare stylesheet so you can map one to the other.

Post back when you have more questions, or if you still have problems with your import. Lots of very knowledgeable people hang out here.

[Bambina_Mena]

Hi; thanks. I've already done exactly as you indicated in your reply. As a matter of fact, I've done it three times. No-go. I am calling Madcap later today.

[Msquared]

So what goes wrong? DO you get to the point where you can select the stylesheet. If you select it, what happens on the next screen? Do you see some styles to map, but not the styles you were expecting? Or do you see no styles to map at all?

Also, does the stylesheet you've been supplied work for other people for their Flare projects, or is it the first time anyone has tried to use it with Flare?

[Bambina_Mena]

It has been a while since I was here but I thought I should post this to help someone else who may need to do exactly what I needed to do.
First of all, I started with a Word document with styles just the way they should appear on the other side.... so, why select "Don't Preserve Word Styles" -- this I learned much later. If your Word document looks absolutely top-notch and matches the department's styles in every way, by all means preserve them. That was the key to this entire import from Word to Flare. My perfect Word styles were clobbering my perfect Flare style(sheet) -- or vice versa. When I understood this, no need to select "Don't Preserve Word Styles". Things came over looking fantastic.

[Msquared]

Glad you've solved it.

There is a bit of a learning curve with Flare, but many of us think it's worth it.

When I first started using Flare and did my first Word import (with near perfect styles), I did preserve Word styles. That meant that Flare generated me a stylesheet with my existing Word styles coded up as CSS. As a CSS newbie, that was really useful as I could see how they should look in CSS.

Once I'd set up my stylesheet to my satisfaction, now I import and map the Word styles to Flare styles. The only thing is that Flare is a bit sneaky (naughty, I think) and still insists on generating you a new stylesheet, presumably so it can add any other Word styles it finds that aren't in your Flare stylesheet.

I don't mind this. What I do mind is that it associates this new stylesheet individually with every imported topic. So the first step in tidying up the project is a global find and replace to get rid of this in every topic. The second is to compare Flare's new stylesheet with mine, and see what, if anything, is different, and work out what I need to do about it.

[Jess77]

Bambina,
I hear you. The Word import is such a pain that I wind up copying and pasting more often than not. It's just as much work as all the cleanup afterwards and I feel like I have more control over the content.

Marjorie,
How exactly do you do that global find and replace?
I find global find and replace activities to be especially difficult in Flare.

Thanks!