Hello all. Quick question about annual reports / other formal PDF presentations. It seems to me that a great deal of creative and copy goes into making an Annual Report. Pictures, type, financial tables/graphs, etc must all be combined into one document that has a consistent brand theme throughout. My question is how are these created in practice? Is there some special publishing software or is it a combination of many different programs? I'm looking for a way to semi-automate PDF creation by maintaining a template in Acrobat / Photoshop that is styled how I like and that feeds off several word and excel documents. Any advice please? Thanks. Marvin.
There is specific software for it. It's called desktop publishing software and is suited exactly for what you are looking to do. They allow templates/ styles to be saved and called when needed. This is how magazines, newspapers, annual reports, books, etc. are created. There are many options our there. There is InDesign from Adobe, Quark and if you are going to be using a lot of Word/Excel documents Microsoft makes their own called Publisher... this might be best for you if you are already working with MS products.
Okay, brilliant thanks. I have been reading more and learned a little about InCopy / InDesign. Please pardon my ignorance on the subject. Typically we are only talking about minor changes that need to be made to the content for each presentation. Perhaps you may be kind enough to share some of your thoughts about these questions: What is the difference between InDesign, Publisher and Acrobat Pro for importing content, styling and exporting as a single PDF ? I'm guessing that InDesign is a lot more powerful and, in the end, prettier than Publisher? Can InDesign handle Word and Excel content well? When importing the content from office documents into an InDesign template for styling, to what extent will styling be done automatically? Will I need to manually work on the design & export for each presentation? How does the typical workflow from editing, styling and PDF export work? How can excel tables by styled as you see in fancy annual reports (custom bar charts not present in excel, nicely layed out tables, etc)? Can InDesign/Publisher export the project once complete or do I need Acrobat Pro or something else to export? Any ideas/suggestions? Thanks!