Hi
It depends what kind of documents do you need.
We at my work have on server a read-only shared folder on server with all
document forms (Word or Excel) available to download. Plus in every folder
an inventory document (Word) with list of documents and hyperlinks to them.
You can have nice documents in Word (you have considerably more options to
design them, compared with Excel) - but you must learn to use it. Here is an
expromt list of useful options:
1. instead spaces or tabs use aligning.
2. When you need to align some text to left, and some other text on same row
centerd or to right, insert a table (2*1 or 3*1), tüye your texts into table
cells, set alignment for every cell, and set cell borders to nothing
3. When you need to shift your text to right compared to other paragraphs,
use Indent or insert an one-cell table like described above.
4. It looks like you know about styles, so I only mention them here.
5. Very useful feature in Word is possibility to create document templates.
Create an empty documet, select SaveAS, and set document type to Document
Template (*.dot). Design the document how you want to see it (p.e. you can
use tables to place various texts exactly where you want), adding any
permanent texts, but also header or/and footer, inserting logo, etc.. From
menu, activate the Forms toolbar. You can insert text boxes, combos, or
check boxes into your document from there. And when finished, you can lock
your template (remove field shading before - also from Forms toolbar) and
save it. Now when user creates a new document from menu (File.New), he/she
can select from available templates. When the created template is selected,
a new document with all you put into template in it is created. All is
locked except controls inserted into template from Forms toolbar. When you
enter some text into text box, the predefined text is adjusting
automatically.
Excel is better, when user has to enter a lot of organized data (tables) -
especially when you want to calculate something.
And there is a way you can use both of them together. When you have some
data in excel table (with header row - it's essential), and you want to
create some number of documents based on those data (a document for row in
table), or you need to print often similarily composed documents based on
these data, then you can use Word's Mail Merge. You define your Excel table
as data source, and then design a main document, (it's somwhat like
template) where you can insert contents of your table cells (fields). You
are afforded various document types - form letters, envelopes, labels etc.
And you can select for output the print, word document, or mail. With last,
you can determine the field from where the mail address is read. And before
sending mails or printing documents, you have various ways to determine,
which rows in your table are processed (seting filters).
A bonus for mail merge - you can at every time create an exact copy of
document (when you haven't changed your date in table, or your main dociment
design).
And you can use the same table with various main documents. And your main
document with various tables too. There is the only limit - the fields the
main document is referring to, must be available in excel table (with
exactly same column header).
