What program should I use to assemble a big business document?

[MrCraphead]

Ok, this is for a school project, and basically I have about 11 people sending me 10-15 pages each of material. What my job is, is to put everything together in a business like document to turn in.

I was wondering what program would be best for this job. I guess my main concern with Word, is that if I change something drastically in page 5 or soemthing, then the spacing in all the other pages will be messed up. Understand? :\ I guess I'm just looking for something more professional or powerful than Word.........

Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[MrCraphead]

come on guys...........

 

[Healey]

No doubt there are better solutions, but I would use Word and insert a page break at the end of each section. That would stop the pagenation (sp?) problem you dread.

Again there are probably better programs, but you're probably fairly comfortable with Word, so why waste the time to learn another program that you may never use again?

 

[MrMilney]

The painful truth is that if you want a good looking document when you are done you are going to have to deal with many issues including pagnation (sp?), line spacing, fonts, etc. If you are lucky eveyone who is submitting work to you will have used Word's styles feature. If so, your life will be considerably easier. If not, you can look forward to going through the document line by line.

 

[Bglad]

more powerful or more professional than word???!!

If you are having formatting problems it is your fault, not word. i.e. when you indent, you need to either use a style or set an indent marker rather than hitting the space bar five times.

You need to use formatting tools, indents, page breaks, styles etc. it sounds like a pain but in fact is much easier. then when you change something, everything falls right into place automatically. every other word processor works the same way.

mrmilney is right, but unfortunately i don't run into many people that use word correctly. so if you have to put the document together you have to do this work for everyone else. then watch them screw it up when you give it back to them to proofread it.

the way to do it is setup a template with styles the way you want it then cut and paste from what others give you into your formatted document, set the styles, insert page breaks if necessary and you're good to go.

 

[gsaldivar]

Word is all you need.

The easiest approach to your problem is to work closely with your team to finish all of the changes to the text, THEN worry about polishing it up and making the formatting/spacing/etc. consistent.

With this approach, you will only have to do the formatting once - as the last step.

I've worked on many collaborative projects in college and business this way, and Microsoft Word is truly all you need.