Our church executive committee is interested in buying page-layout software for our (elderly) office secretary, whose job would be to become proficient enough so she could turn out brochures for the church.
She has already said she is nervous about the learning curve of these applications and wants something that is easy to learn and use, which is fine with us. After ruling out MS Publisher as too limited, we have narrowed our selection to either PageMaker and Quark. While the latter seems more professional and powerful, we are not looking to do anything more than put out a few brochures a year–nothing production oriented. An advisor has told us that PageMaker is easier to learn and also is more compatible with the church’s PCs. And so we are now interested in PageMaker.
Two questions: (1) Is PageMaker really easier to learn and use? (2)If the secretary practices diligently, how long would you estimate it would take for her to master PageMaker?
Your assessment of the strengths of PageMaker and Quark is dead on. I had to learn PageMaker to produce newsletters for clients at a PR job I had. I had to learn Quark (though not much of it) when I was working at a magazine.
PageMaker doesn’t have the power that Quark does, but it’s also pretty easy to learn. I was proficient in it after noodling around for a week, and then having 2 training sessions with a guy my bosses rented for the purpose. I’d recommend sending this secretary to a class or two to learn the finer points of PageMaker – you can do some beautiful things with it easily, but some of it does need to be demonstrated first.
Quark is also supposed to run better on Macs than PCs, but I’ve only used it with Macs.
I’ve had the experience of having to learn both PageMaker and Quark Xpress (on the fly) at different jobs. Also, I have recently tutored my wife in producing documents in PageMaker.
To answer your questions:
Neither program is easier to use for someone without experience. Both have their little quirks and eccentricities which have to be dealt with.
Having an experienced person on hand to supervise and answer questions will shorten the learning curve for either program considerably. I taught my wife the fundamentals of PageMaker in about four 1-hour sessions, and then supervised a few subsequent work sessions until the program’s basic commands became second nature.
I was taught both PageMaker and Quark in a similar fashion, except that most of my Quark training built upon my prior knowledge of PageMaker. When I ran into Quark problems, I had a person to call that would answer on-the-spot questions – and I relied on this for about 2 weeks. This same answer-man did sit in with me for a 90-minute Quark crash-course when I first started using Xpress.
I think that bordelond is right. If you have someone experienced on hand to explain things, it is reasonably easy to learn. It isn’t out-of-the-box easy for someone with no DTP experience at all.
I’d recommend looking at the PageMaker newsgroup(comp.graphics.apps.pagemaker). I find it informative and helpful.
I work for a publishing company producing educational books in PageMaker. My boss taught me the basics, and I’ve picked up a lot more through experience. Last year, I wrote an in house PageMaker training manual for new recruits, and it generally takes people a couple of days to get the real basics, and a couple of weeks to finish the course. (The course is quite specific to the way my company does things. I also wouldn’t claim that it’s exhaustive - being a largely self taught department, we pick up new things all the time)
I’m curious as to why you ruled out MS Publisher? Have you seen the 2000 version? It is quite easy and since it is “less professional” than Quark and PM it has a nice user interface. I am quite experienced with computers and have used Quark (not PM) and I find it really user-friendly as it has wizards and remembers settings.
For a church brochure that an elderly technophobe would be using, I would actually recommend MS Publisher 2k.