24 February 2011

No more slidesters, part 6: Publisher 2010’s fall from grace

I’ve mentioned that I make a lot of my posters in Microsoft Publisher. But this may be about to change.

Publisher 2010 is driving me around the twist.

They’ve done something to the automatic “Align to...” feature that makes it incredibly difficult to get things to align. They added the ability to align objects to other objects, but even when you turn off object alignment (shown), getting corners to snap to the grid is astonishingly fiddly. It just doesn’t work right.

I am not alone in making this observation.

For my latest poster, I just gave up.

I went back Publisher 2003 for the initial layout. I did almost everything there, until I was ready to make some PDFs of the poster. Publisher 2010’s PDF export is fast and excellent, and I still like using that. There are one or two other last minutes that I might tweak in Publisher 2010; fixing typos and the like.

But going so far backwards is pretty sad.

Related posts

No more slidesters, part 1: The wrong tool for the job
No more slidesters, part 2: Three Publisher tips
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2 comments:

  1. SpectrumMonday, February 28, 2011 4:48:00 PM

    Move to Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign. I don't think Publisher is color managed. Without color management, professional quality output is difficult to achieve.

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  2. Zen FaulkesMonday, February 28, 2011 6:04:00 PM

    True.

    That said, I personally have not had a case for a conference poster where that high level of precision with the colours was needed.

    If I needed precise colours, I would probably use CorelDRAW! I'm a long time user of Corel, and have used it for posters. My experience (until now) was that doing layouts was quicker in Publisher.

    ReplyDelete

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