Modular Document Creation? Notes Publishing?

Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 6, 2020 at 12:10 PM

I think Frank’s suggestion is a good one: Scrivener (or another writing tool, such as Ulysses for macOS/iOS) can effectively add as a “copy block” editor.

But you could also use Microsoft Word for this, by setting up templates with appropriate fields in them. I hasten to add that I’m not a Word expert (I cordially loathe it, actually, after years of wrestling with its vagaries), but there’s no question that:

a) it’s in very, very widespread use (which is why I still use it) and
b) it’s a very powerful program (and platform, effectively).

By combining it with Excel, you could create compound documents fed by a back-end database (in Excel).

I have a suspicion you could probably do the same thing in the Apple-sphere, using what used to be called iWorks (in this case Pages, Numbers, or possibly just Numbers alone, using its “form” function). But again, I’m not a specialist in this kind of application.

Our own admin database puts together a wide variety of compound documents from multiple FileMaker tables, but FileMaker is now so expensive I don’t generally recommend it to anybody. There’s no denying it’s powerful, however.

Cheers,
Bill