Well, I now have in hand my third or fourth version of Microsoft Publisher, the program I have been using to publish this newsletter for the past three years. There are more sophisticated publishing programs and much more expensive publishing programs, but for the needs of our newsletter I have found Publisher more than adequate. With each new version, too, new features are added. I suppose the big new feature this time is the ability to publish your document easily to the web. As I recall, the previous version had this ability, but it didn’t work very well, so, as far as I was concerned, that feature really wasn’t there. As is often the case with Microsoft, they got it correct the second time around.

Publisher 98 comes in two versions: Standard and Deluxe. With the Deluxe version, you get Microsoft PictureIt, a "user-friendly" graphics manipulation program. Since I already have both Corel Photo-Paint and Micrografx Picture Publisher on my computer, I have no need for such a program. But if that is not your situation, for an extra $30 it looks like a good deal.

This will mark at least the second review I have done of Microsoft Publisher, possibly the third, so first allow me to tell you why a publishing program is necessary even if you already have a very good word processor. If you are only going to write letters and simple reports, then a word processor is more than sufficient. But for quality brochures, newsletters, fancy reports, greeting cards or business cards—a publishing program is a must. The reason is placement and text flow. You simply can not get good placement of graphics on a word processor page, and if you have more than one "article" in your document, you will find that in a word processor controlling the text flow from one page to the next is almost impossible without simply daisy-chaining the articles one after another—something you most likely don’t want to do. I know, because, three years back, my first three or four newsletters were done in Microsoft Word. With two columns per page and more than one article on some pages, I about went crazy trying to control the text flow within each article when a change was made toward the beginning of the article. Boy was I glad to get my first copy of Microsoft Publisher.

In Publisher, text and graphics are contained in "boxes". If you want two columns of text on a page, you put two text boxes the size of the columns on that page. If you would like to additionally have a picture in the middle of the page, you place a picture box there. The text in the text boxes will then behave nicely and flow around the picture. You are allowed different layers of text and graphics which, depending on one’s creative ability, can produce some nice results.

And, of course, there are the wizards which, according to Microsoft, "provide step-by-step instructions that guide you through setting up a publication, then allow you to use the power of the wizard to make global changes to your publication at any time." For the novice, the collection of over 1600 design templates produced by these wizards should be a great help. You have templates for newsletters, envelopes, letterheads, menus, business cards, logos, reports, brochures, etc.

You have the ability to set up profiles, which include items like name, address, logo, color scheme, and have them applied to new publications. Using this feature, you could easily achieve a consistent look for your company’s newsletter, brochures and business cards. Of course, one must be careful here. If you use the Publisher supplied "design looks", then your company’s look might turn out to resemble very much the look of another that used Publisher. One thing you can say about my publications (our newsletter & web site, for example) is that they don’t have a consistent look and certainly don‘t have a coordinated color scheme.

I think the thing I like best about the new version is the automatic spell checking which underlines possible errors in red as you type—just like in Microsoft Word. As before, you also have the ability to edit each article in Word. It now takes one more click of the mouse to get there, though. In fact, several of the features that I used in the previous version that were accessible with a right click to get a menu, then a left click to select an action now require a right click for a menu, then a left click to choose between a selection of secondary menus and a final left click to choose the action. More options mean more time required to choose the one you want. If everything were still plain ASCII text, then we wouldn’t have to make any choices—but we would have typewriter output.

Another nice new feature is the multilevel undo. Before there was only a one level undo. There is also the fixing of common errors as you type. For example, I just noted that Publisher supplied an uppercase A for the beginning of this paragraph to replace the lowercase a that I had typed. Of course features like this can sometime be a problem. Perhaps the lowercase a was not an error, and I wanted it there. Then it would be a fight with Publisher until I went into options and disabled the auto correct feature. But, for most of us and most of the time, such features are nice.

Besides producing this newsletter in Publisher, I have made brochures, business cards, envelopes, personalized mailing labels with graphics. And since Publisher has a mail merge feature, after creating a nice mailing label, you could use the mail merge to access your database of addresses and print out a nice label for everyone for whom you wanted to print a card—or you could print the address information directly on each envelope, or, in fact, print any personalized information you might have in a database into any Publisher document.

Now, once you have created your document, for example our monthly newsletter, you can do several things with it. First you can simply print it out on your printer. That is what I do with the newsletter, then I use this master copy to run the Xerox copies you get in the mail. Second, if you have the money, you could save the document in Publisher format or in PostScript format (if you have that driver installed) for a printing service. If you have the Adobe Acrobat printer driver installed, you could print it to an Acrobat file, as I do for a download via the Internet of the newsletter in this format. This is also an easy way to share your document with others who may not have Publisher, since the Acrobat reader is free for the downloading from Adobe. A final possibility is to publish the newsletter to the World Wide Web.

To accomplish this you need to take care with the layout of your document. The main consideration here is to avoid having any of your text boxes or picture boxes overlap (something I never worry about—in fact desire—in the creation of the newsletter for printing). If they overlap, Publisher will treat that section as a graphic when it creates a web document from your Publisher file—something that is not optimal. After Publisher has transformed each page of your publication into a separate HTML page and created graphic files in the GIF format for all the graphics in your publication, it remains for you to then link all the pages together and provide any further hyperlinks you wish in the document. When finished, publisher will invoke the Web Publishing Wizard to upload your new web document (actually a collection of HTML and GIF files) to the Internet. If you already have your own method of exporting files to the web, you can simply take the folder that contains all these files and export it to the web yourself in your usual manner, e.g., via FTP.

To see the November newsletter turned into a web document with Publisher 98 go to http://www.tpcug.org/publisher/pub9811/page1.html, hidden away in the study material section for our Internet SIG. It looks a lot like the original or the Adobe Acrobat version, but it has the additional feature that you can navigate through it while viewing it on the web. Even though Publisher 98 can be used to create nice looking web pages or even web documents like the newsletter example, it is not a web site management tool like Microsoft FrontPage.