Best Method for creating inter-office CAD Bulletins

[mikehaff]

I am the CAD Manager at a small design firm. I want to start creating bulletins with screen shots and such that contain useful tips and customization updates. I want it to be professional but don't have any money in my budget for a desktop publishing software nor do I have the time for a steep learning curve. I'm looking for suggestions on what software to use(hopefully just MS Word) and an online tutorial for creating such bulletins.

[Wanderer]

I am the CAD Manager at a small design firm. I want to start creating bulletins with screen shots and such that contain useful tips and customization updates. I want it to be professional but don't have any money in my budget for a desktop publishing software nor do I have the time for a steep learning curve. I'm looking for suggestions on what software to use(hopefully just MS Word) and an online tutorial for creating such bulletins.

Blogs tend to be a fairly popular tool for this purpose with a very small learning curve...
Easily searchable, accessible via email updates or RSS feeds.

[wolfgrrlone]

Powerpoint is good as well. Usually comes with MS Office, so if you have Word you might have Powerpoint.

[cadtag]

or Publsiher -- at least it's bundled in our compnay version of MS Office. There are a number of newsletter templates already set up, so getting started is pretty simple. Some time back I published an inter-office CAD Magazine using Publisher. Print to PDF, and email it out. It worked pretty well, the hard part was getting anyone else to contribute - I got tired of the thing reading like my private soapbox. Heck, that's what Blog's are for.

If you're low on bucks, and not wedded to the MSOffice platform, you could look into LibreOffice formerly OpenOffice.Org) - lot's of capabilities and templates there as well.

Might want to think about a tips 'n trick wiki structure

[mikehaff]

Thank you everyone, I will weigh all of these options.

[cadtag]

There's also Scribus, www.scribus.net - a FOSS desktop publishing application. free to use and under GPL licensing, so no worries about vendor restrictions, ever. I've only played around with it, but definitely looks interesting

[dgorsman]

Here's a thought - do you have PA's or secretaries (not necessarily 'yours', but boss/executive) who do something similar for writing up project documentation?