How well does RH 7 integrate with Word 2007?

[Kevin_Elmore]

Just to give some background, I am currently using RH 5 and Office 2003. A couple years ago, I played with the idea of authoring all of our help files in Word, since it's easier to automate content (for me anyway) through VBA and can be handled by dozens of contributors. The idea was to import the documents into RoboHelp as HTML. Once we saw the output, we scrapped the idea. Our current method is the laborous task of pasting text from Word and formatting it in the HTML editor.

Now we are contemplating upgrading to RH 7 and Word 2007. I am presenting the amount of time saved if we go this route. I'm not sure what to put down, but it depends on just how effective RH 7 is at importing Word 2007. With the proliferation of HTML documents, I would hope that Word 2007 exports more readily. I hope that the styles remain the same.

I do not know if beta testers are still under the NDA. If not, I'd love to hear details about it. I'll be happy with a good/fair/poor ranking.

I wouldn't mind hearing from RH 6 users of your experiences with Word 2007. I can at least speculate how well RH 7 will handle it.

Kevin

[Peter Grainge]

Yes the beta testers are still all under NDA and that prevents even a ranking. However it does not prevent dealing with some of your points.

You are using VBA to create content but once it is in the document, is it straight text that RH should be able to handle or is it something more complex?

Also have you looked at the import stuff on my site. That describes a number of the problems commonly seen and methods of dealing with them, to some extent.

RH6 is not Word 2007 compatible but as we are talking about import, how well RH handles it will depend on whether or not the document has been saved to be Word 2003 compatible.

Hope that helps.

[MergeThis]

When you say "I would hope that Word 2007 exports more readily." does that mean that you've been doing Save As > Web Page from Word, rather than Import > Word Document from RH?

If that's the case, no wonder you're unhappy with the results.

Even when importing Word in RH, we found it necessary to perform a fair amount of reformatting in the Word files before we could confidently import all our projects (40) into a merged RH project. Much of the trouble encountered was due to multiple authors (writers and non-writers) and a huge lack of consistent styles, how lists and tables were created or edited, etc. We went through (and scrapped) dozens of preliminary imports, each time identifying another major Word gaffe that needed fixing, until we could finally do an import that would require almost no work in the RH projects.


Good luck,
Leon