Should I stay with Publisher (2003) or switch to Microsoft Office Word (2003) for my classroom Newsletter project? I am no longer the editor-in-chief, having (very wisely) prearranged to rotate out of it after 4-6 months. ( Whew! ) As the founding editor my opinions carry a lot of weight, though.
Changing an already extant Publisher might involve some migration problems, but I am really asking about starting a new document, new issue, with Word.
Is there anything I can’t do or would be much harder in Word? I should say that we rarely use photos although there have been web images, clip art and word art items present.
Welcome to the SDMB, Jack. This doesn’t seem to be in reference to one of Cecil’s columns so I’ll move this thread to the IMHO forum, our venue for advice and opinion.
I don’t know anything about Publisher, so my response will be of limited value. But I do have one question/suggestion. Will the job continue to rotate frequently? If so, there are a lot more people knowledgeable about Word than about Publisher. That gives you a bigger pool to rotate it to. If your pool of people happens to include those who would be interested in learning Publisher to add it to their resume, this might not be as much of an issue.
Publisher is better, since it gives you much more flexibility in layout. You can place graphics more accurately, do better flowing of text, deal with columns, etc. If you ever do “continued on page 6,” Publisher is better hands down (and things like Quark or Pagemaker are even better, of course).
The disadvantage is that more people know Word. But you can always edit the documents in Word and then import them. And once you learn Publisher, you’ll find the layout goes so much more smoothly that you won’t want to go back to Word for that purpose.
If your choices are Publisher or Word, go with Publisher, but Quark or Pagemaker would be far, far better. If it’s meant to be a valuable learning experience, one of those two would definitely be preferable. I really wouldn’t recommend using Word, though, for the reasons RealityChuck mentioned. People are probably more familiar with Word, but Publisher isn’t that hard to get the handle of and if nothing else it can be a valuable stepping stone on the way to more complex projects.
As a design and publishing professional, let me commend both CaerieD and RealityChuck on recommending pro software. It’s the right thing to teach people who want to be professionals. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had to tell people the ads they created in Publisher cannot be used or opened.
Adobe PhotoShop, Illustrator and InDesign would be a nice choice - but of course that would take some time to learn/teach to use.
I recently taught a course in Word and learned about some features I never even knew existed until I taught the course - my students created some fantastic newsletters after only a few classes. The only reason I would suggest using Word is that if you learn how to do it using that program, you (or your students) will be a hit in any office showing people how to do things with a program most people think they know, but have no idea how powerful it really is.
I have used Word since it came out and, seriously, never knew it could do what it does…then again, most people learn it solely for word processing (letters/memos/mail merge, etc.) and never learn the other cool features.
I’ve never used Publisher (when we produce newsletters, we use Illustrator for design and layout), but whenever I’ve tried to use Word to put together anything that includes pictures, the result has been a lot screaming, hair-pulling and keyboard-pounding. If Publisher is anything like Illustrator, it may be complex and non-intuitive, but once you learn how it works, it works. I use Word to write and proofread the articles, then send that to the designer (or do it myself) where font, spacing, size, layout, graphics, color, photos, etc. are all done in Illustrator and then saved as pdf files.
I think I should look into the various other choices you folks mentioned. They aren’t immediately available here, though, so I’ll ask whether any can be brought in here, either with no cost (we have associated separate programs) or at low cost within budget.