When was the last time you attended a training session held by your company or by an outside training vendor (the guilty shall remain nameless) and received a workbook or handout that was the standard 12 pt Times New Roman font with 14 pt. bold headings? If you got lucky, you might have had something with Palatino type and a few text boxes on it. Oh, and with some clipart (don’t even get me started).

I see it all the time. An organization needs to create training materials. They have Microsoft Word (almost everyone, at least. The Microsoft suite is often the only default productivity tool available in an organization). Therefore, the two must go well together.

I like to call Word the corporate hammer. It is a fairly handy well rounded tool, right? If you are looking to hammer a nail, then yes it is. When creating a brief outline, brainstorming or other Word processing tasks, Word works very well. Unfortunately, however, because Word is often the only tool available, everything becomes the nail. Fliers, quick reference documents, manuals, name cards, certificates and others all end up looking like nails when all that is available is the hammer - and are often mis-treated as a result.

So then, where does the corporate carpenter turn? The hammer is a trusted friend. How can someone give up Word when they finally conquered section breaks and figured out how to remove that extra blank page that always ends up at the end of a document? What else is available?

Enter the page layout tool. Other industries adopted more engaging looks and approaches decades ago. Magazine publishers, marketing companies and others spend a lot of $$ on making their materials look good. They understand the value of making a visually engaging cover page - it sells product.

A page layout tool is essentially a tool that incorporates Word processing with the ability to effectively manage and integrate graphics and other design elements to create a more appealing look. There are two primary tools on the market that are used by the majority of companies and are priced well; Adobe InDesign and Quark Xpress. Each has its side of evangelists that will proclaim whey their choice is the best. I’ll try to avoid that and simply say that I prefer Adobe InDesign.

InDesign can become an organization’s tool box. Screwdriver, saw, tape measure and more, InDesign can provide what Word hasn’t been able to -an engaging and effective product. What’s even better is that it provides powerful tools that make managing content development and the creation of documents more effective and efficient.